Art
Art can come in a variety of forms—paint carefully brushed onto a sheet of canvas or pencil marks thoughtfully scrawled onto a piece of sketch paper. Then there are the less conventional art forms. Skateboards, for example. Or a pair of sneakers. Or knuckle tattoos.
Organic tofu burritos, newly smoked sausages, cold beer and popcorn—the vendors were not serving these at a famers’ market, but at the second night of the Oakland Underground Film Festival, which on Friday turned into a combination of live music, improvised video projection and outdoor film screenings at the Linden Street Brewery.
An aquarium, everyone knows, is a glass case that holds fish. A terrarium is the same thing without the water, so it holds plants, along with the occasional lizard or tarantula. What, then, might be found inside an eight-foot, 3,000-pound sphere called the Wonderarium? Two Oakland artists are trying to decide—and when they do, they want to put it in the middle of Lake Merritt.
This weekend, Oakland movie theaters will host body slamming Bolivian women, an afro-sporting high school funk band, and break dancing. It’s all part of the Oakland Underground Film Festival, opening Thursday night at the Grand Lake Theater.
There’s nothing finer on a Saturday afternoon then a garden full of toilets.
As Alyssia Alexandria entered the newly renovated History Gallery at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) Friday night, a museum volunteer handed her a few scraps of drawing paper, a small yellow pencil, and a black and white pamphlet, an official invitation to play “Choose Your Own California Adventure.”
When conceptual artist Mark Dion needed materials for his new exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, he headed behind the scenes, or technically, under the scenes. “It was a little bit like raiding the icebox,” he says of his time in the belly of the building. “I began scrounging through the archives, spending a lot of time in storage.” After unearthing an eclectic mix of lost treasures—everything from Reagan campaign buttons to a stuffed baby elephant—Dion constructed “The Marvelous Museum,” which opens Sept. 11.
Dozens of people participated in a different type of art walk along Telegraph Avenue on Friday. It was the launch of Invisible City Audio Tours, which has the goal of showing an alternative way of looking at Telegraph Avenue by bringing together Bay Area authors, visual artists and a composer to guide walkers on a tour from MacArthur Bart Station to the central hub of Art Murmur.
If you want to ride with the scraper bike king, you better wear a helmet. Tyrone “Baybe Champ” Stevenson Jr., known around Oakland as the “king” and creator of the scraper bike movement, announced his new rule of the road Saturday near Oakland City Hall.