The Do List: Cats Purring, Nutcrackers Twirling and More for Dec. 12-19
Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more. You can listen to this week’s episode with KQED’s...
View ArticleAudio: San Francisco’s Search for a Maya Angelou Monument is Back at Square One
The San Francisco Arts Commission is rebooting a plan to erect a statue honoring Maya Angelou in front of the main branch of the public library. The move comes nearly two months after city officials...
View ArticleObjects ‘Lost at Sea’ Tell Complex Stories of Historic Shipwrecks
How often do you wander through a museum and stop to wonder exactly how a particular object arrived on this pedestal, in this institution, at this time? I’ll be the first to say: not that often. In a...
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What Happened to the Back-to-the-Landers?
When Alex Arzt started writing letters to the past, she was a bit adrift in time and space herself. It was 2014, and Arzt was halfway through an MFA program. “I am a 26-year-old graduate student at...
View ArticleThe Do List: Agnes Varda, Ghostface Killah and More Picks for the Year’s End
Looking for things to do in the Bay Area this weekend? The Do List has you covered with concerts, festivals, exhibitions, plays, performances and more. You can listen to this week’s episode with KQED’s...
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Photos That Defined ‘Black is Beautiful’ Can Spark Conversation Once Again
At its peak, Black Tumblr was unbeatable. It served a continual dose of contemporary and archival images of black celebrities and strangers alike, an antidote to the mostly white artistic canon that...
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The Best Art I Saw in 2019
Who knew the last year of the decade was going to be such a rollercoaster? As if seeking to cram as much drama, as many ethical debates and emotional farewells into the end of the 2010s as possible,...
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Climate Change Told With Needle & Thread
The Museum of Craft and Design sits in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, within walking distance of the Bay. So when the museum asked Los Altos artist Linda Gass to come up with something new for...
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Revisiting an Architectural Landmark, Hannah Collins Asks Whom it Serves
When surveying the construction materials slated for a New Jersey suburb in 1967, American land artist Robert Smithson famously referred to them as “ruins in reverse,” as “buildings [that] don’t fall...
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Claiming Community Walls for the Black Panther Party
Listen to the podcast to hear moments from the Rightnowish Family Gathering. I stand on the corner of 14th and Peralta in West Oakland, marveling over a mural painted on the broad side of the Sav-Mor...
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Six Bay Area Art Shows to See in 2020
2020 sounds like a year from science fiction. If we’re taking our cues from Hollywood, this is a year in which we can expect machine-augmented humans battling aliens, interdimensional sea monsters and...
View ArticleMeet Oakland’s Latinx Game Developers
In all my years, I’ve never played a video game in which the main character was a mother. Not until the other day, that is, when I walked into Oakland’s Youth Impact Hub. The center, located on 28th...
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Acclaimed Conceptual Artist John Baldessari Dies at 88
John Baldessari, who pioneered a new genre of art in the 1970s and in the process helped elevate Los Angeles’ status in the art world from that of back-water berg to a center of the conceptual...
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In Praise of the Strangest Painting I’ve Ever Seen
When you title an exhibition Strange, as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has, you’d better be able to deliver some pretty odd fare. What’s strange to one person, era or culture may not...
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A 2020 Guide to San Francisco’s Art Fairs, Untitled and FOG
It’s that time of year again, when galleries, designers and art spaces from around the world arrive in San Francisco for a weekend of schmoozing, showcasing and selling their wares. FOG Design+Art (now...
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Vessel Gallery, Oakland Art Murmur Fixture, to Reopen Following 2018...
Oakland Art Murmur fixture Vessel Gallery will reopen in February more than a year after being displaced from its longtime 25th Street home, curator and director Lonnie Lee told KQED. The contemporary...
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An Oakland Metalsmith Risks Instability to Bring Metal Arts to Black Girls
Earlier this month, Oakland metalsmith Karen Smith put the finishing touches on Mamedjarra the Sacred, a sterling silver necklace. After nearly a year of work on the piece—a hammered crescent with...
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Through a San Francisco Peephole, a Glimpse of Video Art in Iran
San Francisco’s Peephole Cinema is so unassuming I accidentally walked past it twice. But that’s part of the magic of this unostentatious (and miniature) screening space, established in 2013 by artist...
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National Endowment for the Arts Awards $1.7 Million to Bay Area Arts Groups
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on Wednesday announced 1,187 grants totaling $27.3 million for arts organizations in every state in the nation, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto...
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A BAMPFA Show Empowers Student Curators to Share Their View of California
At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, a show about California’s geography begins with a wall of people. Catherine Opie’s intimate photograph of two farmworkers wrapped in a butch embrace...
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