A Book Release for Santa Rosa Cartoonist Brian Fies and ‘A Fire Story’
Shortly after Santa Rosa cartoonist Brian Fies returned home on Oct. 9, 2017 to discover that his house and all his family’s possessions had vanished in the Tubbs Fire, he bought some markers at the...
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Shannon Ebner’s Photography is Black and White and Read All Over
Shannon Ebner‘s work is a moving target. Her concentrated, multivalent investigations of the relationship between language and photographic images consistently yield unpredictable outcomes. For STRAY:...
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Whatever You Do, Definitely Do Go in the Basement of This Art Show
In October of 2017, San Francisco gallerist Wendi Norris announced she’d be giving up her eponymous downtown gallery space of eight years to “activate underutilized spaces around the world by using...
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Betti Ono Gallery Secures Long-Term Lease With City of Oakland
Oakland’s Betti Ono gallery, an eight-year-old mainstay of the downtown art scene, has secured a long-term lease for their nearly 2,600-square-foot gallery space in a property owned by the City of...
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Madeleine Albright’s Knitting Featured in Massive SF Yarn Art Project
The original purpose of Fort Point was to defend the San Francisco Bay against hostile warships. These days, the imposing, nineteenth-century brick-and-mortar edifice overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge...
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There Was So Much More to Jay DeFeo Than ‘The Rose’
For those with a bit of Bay Area art history under their belts, any mention of Jay DeFeo’s name invariably conjures looming visions of The Rose, a painting of such monumental and mythic proportions...
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Once Behind Bars, Now Behind the Camera Lens
There’s an uneasy feeling that invades your body the second you walk up the steps and through the metal detectors of the gray concrete edifice that is 850 Bryant Street. Even if you know you haven’t...
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What’s the Deal With That Neon on the Side of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium?
Tonight, the San Francisco Arts Commission will flip the switch on a large-scale neon artwork covering the western side of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. For anyone passing by Polk Street between...
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Charles Schulz’s Letter About Democracy, Discovered 50 Years Later
In 1970, students in a fifth-grade class at Hawthorne School in Beverly Hills were assigned to write a letter to someone they admired, asking them “What makes a good citizen?” Joel Lipton, 10 years old...
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Does Silicon Valley Need An Instagramable Icon?
Hollywood has the Hollywood Sign. San Francisco has the Golden Gate Bridge. But there’s no one iconic visual the world recognizes as embodying Silicon Valley. The garage in Palo Alto where Hewlett...
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SFMOMA, MoAD, Other Yerba Buena Museums Offer Free Entry for 3rd Thursday
If you’re the kind of person who can spend your entire Thursday cruising the arts and cultural institutions of the Yerba Buena district, have I got a deal for you! (And for those of us with a 9-to-5,...
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‘Fries With That’ Serves Up Darkly Humorous Photo Show, And a Side of Ketchup
Jordan Stein’s been working on a joke. “You might not like it,” he says. “It’s a Jewish joke.” The build-up is full of anxiety and hand-wringing: a miserable man experiencing the brunt of life’s woes...
View ArticleRadical Ballerina Maya Stovall’s Urban Performances Come to Fort Mason Center
The KQED Arts team has been thinking about the choreography of city life a lot lately (the second season of our video series If Cities Could Dance launches today). But Detroit-born artist Maya Stovall...
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Rightnowish: Stepping Inside Chris Fraser’s Pinhole Camera
Chris Fraser is a trained photographer who’s taken his craft to another dimension: for his current exhibition Windows, he invites attendees to step inside of a pinhole camera. I first met Chris at a...
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Tigers, Trucks and Television Spoofs in ‘True Blue Mirror’ and ‘Introspections’
Doppelgängers are enjoying a moment in the zeitgeist, thanks to Jordan Peele’s cinematic depiction of “tethered” selves—lives lived in the shadows of others’ free will. But in True Blue Mirror, a...
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How a Local Video Artist Accidentally Made A Viral Hit on Kid’s YouTube
The world of kid’s YouTube is a thing unto its own. If you don’t have a child, or spend time with young children, chances are you know nothing of Peppa Pig, surprise-egg videos or the controversies...
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Mural Critiquing Slavery, Manifest Destiny Draws Controversy in San Francisco
A Great Depression-era mural depicting George Washington as a slave owner and promoter of the United States’ genocidal westward expansion is the latest public artwork to draw controversy in San...
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With a Roll of the Dice, Artist’s Game Tells a Story of West Coast Science...
“It looks like a game and a table, but in fact it’s a book,” explains artist Stéphanie Solinas about her upcoming exhibition Becoming Oneself at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin. I met the...
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Immigration Attorney by Day, Artist by Night, María Blanco Paints a Landscape...
Last week, Sean Hannity’s correspondent Lawrence Jones tweeted out a photo of himself at the U.S./Mexico border sporting what appeared to be a protective vest. According to Jones, he wore the tactical...
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Lenn Keller: Keeping the Bay Area’s Black Lesbian History Alive
Marching down Market Street, Lenn Keller knew she was experiencing an extraordinary moment in history. With her housemates, holding protest signs made in their Berkeley apartment, Keller joined a...
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