Art
The 3rd annual Art in Nature festival featured more than 200 artists at Redwood Regional Park in the hills east of Oakland this Sunday.
Mike and John Manente stand proudly together as they look up at their recent creation: Sheila, a dignified woman with a gentle face blended from yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, and earth tones. The setting sun gives her an amber hue. She’s the subject of the “The Gardener,” the latest in an ongoing series of murals entitled “The People of Oakland” by the father and son team. Last year the two men, both professional artists, created the “People of Oakland” to…
In May, Rob “Reason” Silver, a part-time record producer from Oakland, and Jason Samel, the owner of a small insurance brokerage in New York, announced their nearly identical but independently conceived plans to bring a new element into the national Occupy protest—marketability. Both had come to the conclusion that there was potential within the anti-capitalistic, determinedly decentralized protest to sell a product that could help raise funds and draw in new supporters. In May, both men launched Occupy benefit albums.
The small, high-ceilinged gallery was barely big enough for the turnout Friday night. The modest rows of folding chairs easily filled, and then people found space on the paint-smudged concrete floor wherever they could. Some crouched on the stairs, others stood in the back, but everybody listened, because this was a presentation about love.
The online radio station Pandora has teamed up with the Great Wall of Oakland, a monthly video art screening, to host an evening of local music and video shorts this Friday. The “Homegrown” event on September 7 will debut Pandora’s “Sounds of Oakland,” a sampling of local music, which will accompany video shorts projected on the wall in Oakland’s Uptown district. It also marks the first collaboration between the two Oakland-based organizations. “We approached Pandora because their specialty is music…
In a parking garage in East Oakland’s Jingletown neighborhood, an enormous piece of local music history gazes out at parked cars. More than ten feet tall, and sporting sunglasses, the relic is a stage prop modeled after rapper Shock G. The head was featured in a 1993 music video by rapper Shock G’s platinum-selling group, Digital Underground, and went out with the group on tour. Now it collects dust and dirt from exhaust pipes.
A contemporary art gallery in West Oakland debuted this month with an exhibition of Bay Area artists, filling the top floor of a former auto service center with abstract paintings, whimsical sculptures and an old, wooden chair cast in aluminum.
Whether it is visual art, music, crafts, film or writing, the Rock Paper Scissors Collective in Oakland encourages community members to teach, sell, exhibit and learn about art. The shop on Grand and Telegraph Avenues offers a collection of hats, sketches, mixed media art, sewing equipment and jewelry as well as a large collection of zines—magazines, cartoons and books self-published by the writers.
Thousands of Oaklanders filled downtown Oakland this weekend to shake a tail feather, boogaloo, rock ‘n’ roll, or do the Harlem Shuffle during the city’s annual Art & Soul festival. The two-day outdoor festival—which closed several busy streets—featured jazz, rock, gospel, punk, honky-tonk, metal, folk and Latin musicians from the Bay Area.