Art
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.
It was hard to know what to expect. This was Thursday evening, three days before Halloween. The title of the event was only semi-instructive: The D.I.Y. Emporium: A Benefit for Rock Paper Scissors, an art collective in Oakland. The entry fee was five dollars, proceeds to go to the collective. Samantha Stevens, a filmmaker and event planner from Oakland, put the show together. A deep maroon carpet, faded after years of use, covered the floor of the entryway and continued…
A little rain didn’t keep Oaklanders away from the first annual East Bay Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. The fair, which was an indoor and outdoor exhibition of over 100 Bay Area businesses and tech projects, was held at Temescal’s Park Day School.
The signature teal color of an old-school iMac stood out among a hodgepodge of items. There was a Sierra Nevada box filled with torn packaging envelopes, complete with stamps and postmarked dates. The one-man crew of 21 Grand—a downtown Oakland gallery and performance space—was purging everything that had accumulated in storage for the last decade, but the venue’s “emergency rummage sale” a couple of weeks ago wasn’t just an effort to collect a few bucks. It was to make the month’s rent.
In 20 minutes, Rick Butler can crochet a yarn ball into a hat that he says is unique. Like a mini handicraft exhibition, the hats are collected on a blanket laid on the edge of a plaza strewn with cigarette butts. The colorful hats easily stand out from the surrounding grey concrete. “Every hat is different,” says Butler. “I take a picture of every hat I make so I remember.”
While visual art enthusiasts usually stick to the galleries during the Oakland Art Murmur, this Friday the film-heads in the crowd may want to linger in front of the Great Wall of Oakland for “Behind the Pixar Screen,” a nod to the artists who work at the beloved Emeryville animation studio.
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.