Art
A handicapped woman takes her crafts to the street.
When the Shotgun Players staged Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” about England’s bloody War of the Roses, they did it without Elizabethan costumes, stage props, elaborate sets, or even seats for the playgoers. Makeshift propane lamps lit the stage – a windy parking lot at King Middle School in North Berkeley. Audience members perched on plastic, five-gallon buckets or tried to get comfortable on the concrete for the nearly three-hour production. Actors wore a random assortment of street clothes, which the audience…
Each country has missing pieces in its history. Japan, my country, for example, never admits that the Nanking Massacre happened, or that residents in Okinawa, near the end of World War II, were forced to kill themselves rather than being taken POWs by U.S. forces. The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present, the current exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, helps illuminate a missing piece in Mexico’s Afro-Mexican history. The exhibit concentrates on the history of…
By SHILANDA WOOLRIDGE It was rockin’ till the cops came knockin’.
A number of Oakland artists are trying to pass down the tradition of screen printed posters to a younger generation – including its political history. Melanie Cervantes, Jesus Barraza and Favianna Rodriguez take on the challenge.
Tucked away between a Subway sandwich shop and a boarded up storefront on Grand Avenue is Mercury 20, a large, one-room art gallery. And upstairs, hovering above it all, is the Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, a small room currently showing the work of three professional art-installers, who happen to be artists themselves.
The Morning Shift. The flat, wide stretch of Telegraph Avenue that runs through the Koreatown-Northgate district is mostly empty when I arrive at Mama Buzz café a few minutes after 7:00 a.m. A man pushes a shopping cart and some bags of bottles and cans down the sidewalk. A lone woman loads up her car with groceries in the parking lot of Koreana Plaza Market. One helmeted biker has already beat me to the door of Mama Buzz; he tries…
Three vastly different young artists presented their latest work Wednesday night at the Kala Art Institute’s new studio space on San Pablo Avenue near the Berkeley-Oakland border. About 30 artists, instructors and community members gathered in a small, high-ceilinged room off of the main studio to drink wine and participate in a discussion that ranged from globalization, existentialism and Derrida to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and psychological issues about self-control. Favianna Rodriguez, 30, an Oakland native whose parents immigrated from Peru,…
The parks in Oakland are alive. At 7:30 a.m., more than a hundred people lift their hands in unison, moving with slow, controlled energy as they practice the ancient Chinese art of Tai Chi. A few feet away, six older women and one man practice their line-dancing steps, hopping and skipping to the tinny sounds emanating from a hand-held boom box. Two women play badminton without a net. Welcome to Madison Square Park on Jackson Street, in Oakland. Any day…