Art
The Jack London Market Square building was transformed into a showcase of Oakland’s ‘Do it Yourself’ (DIY) culture at the Patchwork handmade festival.
Kinetic Steam Works is a West Oakland-based nonprofit that utilizes steam to power antique machinery, like a player piano and a printing press, and to create artwork.
Last Saturday, a group of over 100 people gathered at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland to celebrate the launch of “The Griots of Oakland,” a book and exhibition about young black men living in the city.
Today Antique is wearing a black skirt over green tights, a boldly-striped tank top over a black long-sleeve shirt, bright earrings that look like ice cream cones you might find in a Dr. Seuss story, an orange and black bandanna in her hair, and black 1950s-style cat’s eye glasses with sparkles in the corners. “I dress in different eras every day,” she says.
The music she creates, however, is naked.
As the lead vocalist of the ensemble Antique Naked Soul, Antique, along with vocal percussionist Tommy Shepherd, also known as Soulati, and vocalists Jayme Brown and N’gala McCoy, composes songs that consist solely of the human voice. The challenge, she and Shepherd say, is managing to create full-bodied “manifestos” within the limitation of such spare instrumentation.
Body music, for the uninitiated, is an art form composed of sounds and rhythms made solely with the body.
When the photographer epli came up with the project “Here. Before. Art From A Contested Space,” she had one goal foremost in mind—to spark an honest conversation about gentrification between new residents of West Oakland and the “traditional” residents rooted in the neighborhood.
A middle school hallway with its long, lonely corridors often serves as the typical wandering place for a troubled kid. At Claremont Middle School in North Oakland, students are fed up with the perception of hallways in their school. Through a ‘Design Thinking and Making’ class that was implemented this fall, students in grades 6-8 are actively attempting to change the space they study in five days a week. To make the school more welcoming, students have discussed strategies for…
Latham Square is an experimental project in a space once entirely open to vehicle traffic, but was transformed into a pedestrian plaza last August. The City of Oakland partnered with the Downtown Oakland Association and design studio Rebar to offer foot-travelers a place to sit and socialize.
The theatre company will be bringing its collaborative energy to Downtown Oakland in 2014.