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A Sunny Summer Group Show, With a ‘Twist’
Twist is everything you want out of a summer group show. Made up of thoughtful formal juxtapositions, irregular shapes and a hint of silliness, the four-person meditation on geometric abstraction is,...
View ArticleWest Oakland’s Aggregate Space Gallery Receives Prestigious Warhol Grant
The West Oakland nonprofit gallery Aggregate Space announced Tuesday the receipt of a $90,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. It is one of five Bay Area arts organizations to...
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Gala Porras-Kim’s ‘Ancient Technologies’ Wants to See What Happens
If everything goes as planned, the rosy piece of alabaster currently propped up on wooden pegs at the Headlands Center for the Arts will have a nice big hole in its middle by 2064. Gala Porras-Kim, the...
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Photographers Reveal Through Concealment in SFAC’s ‘Conversation 7’
It’s been five years since the last Conversation show at the San Francisco Arts Commission, but it was worth the wait. The series pairs a Bay Area artist with someone from “another point on the globe,”...
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At Puerto Alegre, a Feast for the Stomach—and the Eyes
The Bay Area houses countless unconventional art spaces, and one of them just happens to be a Mexican restaurant. If you’ve ever eaten at Puerto Alegre, a Mission District institution going strong...
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Peter Hujar Slows Down the ‘Speed of Life’ at BAMPFA
Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, the elegantly staged photography retrospective recently landed in Berkeley, bears a poignant misnomer. For Hujar (1934-1987), portraying landscapes, animal studies and the...
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‘Funk Ain’t Dead,’ Long Live Funk Art!
Fifty-one years ago, the definition of Funk art was fairly synonymous with “hot mess.” Peter Selz, director at the time of UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum, organized a 1967 show simply titled Funk,...
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#SayHerName: 10 Illustrated Tributes to Nia Wilson Lighting Up Social Media
In the days since 18-year-old Nia Wilson was slain in Oakland, Bay Area artists have taken up their pens to honor her memory. With hand-drawn illustrations, digital collages and mixed media works,...
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Fast, Crass and In Your Face: INDECLINE Redefines Activist Art in the Trump Era
Early in the morning of June 21, commuters on Interstate 80 were greeted by an unusual sight. “We make kids disappear,” read an altered billboard over Shellmound Street in Emeryville. The message was...
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A Sparse Exhibition for a Crowded City at SOMArts
Is the floor of SOMArts always this glossy gray? I asked as I stepped into the cavernous cultural center’s main gallery. Yes, the gallery attendant confirmed, it’s always this glossy gray. There’s just...
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At BAMPFA, the Discarded and Forgotten Become Prayers for the Future
As I walked away from Cecilia Vicuña’s survey exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, I thought about accumulation. Representing a career spanning four decades, from her...
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A Jackson Pollock Painting Gets A Touch-Up — And The Public’s Invited To Watch
Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 1, 1949, is a swirl of multi-colored, spaghettied paint, dripped, flung and slung across a 5-by-8-foot canvas. It’s a textured work — including nails and a bee (we’ll...
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Let’s Talk about the Public Art at the New Transbay Transit Center
Part park, part bus station and aspirational future high-speed rail terminus, the new Transbay Transit Center opens with literal fanfare (courtesy of the West Grand Bass Band) on Aug. 11, followed by a...
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SFMOMA Union Talks Drag Over Cost-of-Living Raise Proposal
When patrons arrived at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, July 19, for a screening of 1971 blaxploitation flick Shaft, they were greeted by organized labor supporters with thousands...
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Bay Brilliant: Joey Alison Sayers
Welcome to KQED Arts’ Bay Brilliant, a series celebrating 10 local artists, creatives and makers who are pushing boundaries in 2018. Driven by passion for their own disciplines—music, dance, theater,...
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At 90, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Has No Time for the Art World (and Never Did)
Ask Barbara Stauffacher Solomon if she has any advice for artists looking to follow in her footsteps, and the diminutive 90-year-old doesn’t mince words. “Oh I think that’s a lot of shit,” she says....
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Bay Brilliant: Quynh-Mai Nguyen
Welcome to KQED Arts’ Bay Brilliant, a series celebrating 10 local artists, creatives and makers who are pushing boundaries in 2018. Driven by passion for their own disciplines—music, dance, theater,...
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Bay Brilliant: Anyka Barber
Welcome to KQED Arts’ Bay Brilliant, a series celebrating 10 local artists, creatives and makers who are pushing boundaries in 2018. Driven by passion for their own disciplines—music, dance, theater,...
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Susan Meiselas’ Retrospective Provokes Questions About the Ethics of...
For more than 45 years, Susan Meiselas has blurred the lines between photojournalism and fine art photography, documenting subjects ranging from a group of girls in New York’s Little Italy to the...
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Art Studios Saved as Oakland Community Land Trust Acquires First Live-Work...
In 1984, Dixi and Mario Carrillo bought the storefront next door to their home in East Oakland. A few years later, they bought the property next to that. The couple then combined the two parcels,...
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