Art
The Crucible, Oakland’s non-profit arts education center began in a small Berkeley warehouse in January 1999. Listen in as reporter Mary Flynn explores The Crucible and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
Sitting before a semi-circle of her peers at Chabot Elementary, fifth-grader Nyah read aloud from her story, Alia and Andrew and the Story of the Odd Objects. It’s a novel, and she wrote the whole thing this fall. Her audience, consisting of nine fellow classmates and instructor Sondra Hall, were gathered on a Tuesday for the semester’s last session of “Take My Word For It!,” an afterschool workshop developed by Hall.
Oakland forge and glassworks The Crucible opened their 56,000 square foot studio to a craft fair this weekend, featuring blacksmithing demonstrations, glass blowers and 70 artists.
Mariella Cordova and Jeff Derenthal, both seniors at Skyline High School, sat in the fifth row of the theater red seats laughing and talking over each other in their excitement to explain the dance-musical-comedy performance they were about to take part in—the school’s new fall musical, A Cinderella Christmas.
The weather outside is frightful, but thrifty Oakland art lovers and gift-shoppers might consider braving the chill to head down Telegraph Avenue for the Temescal Winter Art Hop, which will run Friday night from 6pm to 9pm between 42nd and 50th streets.
It was a question left unanswered in a press-release issued by the Oakland Unified School District last week: What do Oakland Schools, the Oakland Police Department, and a project to build a 60,000-pound bronze monument in downtown Oakland have in common? The answer: about $10.5 million.
Rock Paper Scissors Collective, an Oakland-based volunteer cooperative offering free and low-cost art classes to the community, has offered “Street Style Fashion” workshops since 2007. The workshops, which are presented in partnership with Arts and Creative Expression, are open by application to young fashion designers ages 14 to 25 and focus on teaching participants professional design skills. Each workshop, students begin or continue work on a garment using techniques they develop in class to move their work forward. The clothing the students create ranges from sweatshirts to skirts to dresses.
For nearly 20 years, the Oakland Museum of California has operated under a public-private partnership with the City of Oakland and the nonprofit Oakland Museum of California Foundation, sharing the $15 million annual budget and control of operations. But now city officials may remove themselves from that partnership, leaving the nonprofit foundation to run the 41-year-old cultural institution.
About once a month, the Paramount Theatre on Broadway hosts a Movie Classics night, at which patrons can enjoy old favorites at the right price: $5. The movie night began thirty years ago, and has long been a favorite of local cinema junkies and Paramount staff. The theater screened its second-to-last classic of 2010 on Friday night, with another tentatively schedule for December. A January film is already lined up, and as far as general manager Leslee Stewart is concerned, the series will go on indefinitely.