Art
Despite not attending art school, Derek McDonald’s art has permeated much of the local visual landscape, from gold leafed yacht names in the Emeryville Marina to local bar placards to the vintage signs at Oakland’s Fairyland park for children. At his West Berkeley studio, Golden West Sign Arts, McDonald stays true to the tradition of sign painting without any digital assistance.
This Saturday, a group of Oakland based-artists will stage the East Bay’s first literary pub crawl, a beast-themed, multiple-venue festival featuring performances, recitals and readings by at least 166 authors, poets and musical groups across 25 locations in Oakland.
On Wednesday, participants in the new Warriors for Peace program will present their video productions and narratives at a showcase to be held in Oakland, marking the end of 32 weeks of hands-on training in the production of short video narratives and interviewing skills that have enabled young men of color from the Bay Area to tell stories based on their life experiences.
It’s Sunday afternoon at the Macarthur B. Arthur Gallery in North Oakland as Saskia Levy-Sheon chooses songs on her laptop to play as background music. It’s the last day of her gallery show. As she does this, a local resident who only gives his name as Pierre comes in and takes a look around the exhibit. “Man this is beautiful!” Pierre exclaims as he examines the photographs and artwork arranged neatly around the gallery. “It’s about time somebody started represented…
The Oakland Museum of California is hosting the first museum retrospective of comic artist Daniel Clowes. The exhibition, curated by Susan Miller, features all the key artwork in the career of the celebrated cartoonist who is based in Oakland, and includes 100 original pieces from 1989 to 2011.
Oakland’s first annual Murmurama — a multi-venue celebration that mixed Chinoiserie with the avant-garde, baroque, cubist, or monochrome — challenged the San Francisco Fine Art Fair Saturday by luring hundreds of art enthusiasts to the East Bay for a night of open galleries and performances
It’s been nearly three decades since the Bhopal disaster left thousands dead in India, altering the face of one of the world’s largest agriculture economies following a leak of methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals at a plant run by Union Carbide India Limited. Today, attitudes towards the excessive use of chemicals in India have changed, but the pollution of public water systems with industrial waste from plants run by major chemical manufacturers continues with very little regulation. This was…
Laura Bruland of Yes and Yes Designs makes hand-made, laser cut jewelry … out of old books. Most of the books that she uses tend to be old textbooks, Reader’s Digests, or children’s books. She avoids books with glossy covers, preferring fabric or textile covers, and tries to use books with lots of colors or images. “I don’t cut up classics or first editions,” she said, adding that she always tries to buy books that most people would not want to read.
At the 16th Annual Youth Speaks Poetry Slam Finals, thirteen young people between from across the Bay Area held the audience captive with their poems on everything from young love to the broken economy. Hear their poems in this interactive audio piece.