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Artist Favianna Rodriguez is busy designing political posters and preparing to produce a large glass mural. A printmaker by trade, the mural will be the first time Rodriguez works wth glass. Ten minutes away, in a gallery in downtown Oakland, Natalia Mount spends her days guiding visitors through the current exhibition, which includes sculptures that move and emit loud sounds. The executive director of Pro Arts Gallery, Mount is eagerly planning new shows that toy with accepted notions of what is…
On a Friday night in East Oakland, Shoshana Zambryski-Stachel, founder and owner of ArtVale gallery, prepares for a monthly community potluck by arranging cheese wedges, dips, cut vegetables, and wine across two large tables at the back of the gallery. The air outside is crisp and cool, but the gallery is warm and well-lit, and will soon be filled with children and adults eating, drinking, and drawing together. A Bay Area native, Zambryski-Stachel opened ArtVale two years ago on Champion…
A prolific artist and activist, Favianna Rodriguez has been printmaking and designing murals for more than 20 years. The finalist of a public competition held by the San Francisco Arts Commission, Rodriguez’s next project will be installed at the Garfield Pool in San Francisco.
It is a quiet Sunday afternoon, and Pro Arts Gallery is closed to the public. But even on her day off, the executive director Natalia Mount is excited about the current exhibition. Stylishly dressed in a fitted black leather jacket and heeled boots, she plugs in three sculptures that begin to produce loud sounds. The exhibition, titled “Invisible Choirs,” is artist Nolan Lem’s interpretation of the societal effects of automation and artificial intelligence. Lem experimented with sound and movement to…
Crack, snap, and pop. That it is all you hear on the football field as Ronald Jenkins, known to his friends and teammates as RJ, drives his shoulder into the waistline of the ball carrier for the opposing team. With a huge thud that sounds like a body breaking in half, they both hit the turf. As the whistle blows in the background, signaling the end of the play, Jenkins gets up and proceeds to dance, not even acknowledging his…
Bang! There go the bowling pins, as Benton Lu knocks down another strike on the bowling lane. He stands there quietly, and admires his work. Then he turns around, and walks back to the resurfacing machine to grab his ball. Lu returns to position to deliver another strike. He cocks his left foot back, and begins to walk slowly towards the lane, like a lion getting ready to devour its prey. His eyes look as if he was in a…
The ball smacks down right in the middle of the court off of Hannah Hoang’s hand. She quickly runs back into the line, as she gets ready to deliver another devastating spike. She leaps into the air as gracefully as if she were performing ballet, but comes down hard with a spike that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As a defender on the women’s volleyball team at Oakland Senior High School, Hoang is…
Some athletes have a strong passion for their sport, and play it recreationally. Others play their sports because they rely on them to escape the stress of their daily life. And still thers depend on their performance to land them an athletic scholarship, and compete within the Oakland Athletic League hoping to get recruited to college teams and compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association level. In this series, three Oakland student athletes spoke about what brings them to the field,…
This article is part of “Birthing Inequity,” an Oakland North project on maternal and infant health disparities in Oakland. See the full multimedia report here. In 2003, while she was carrying her third child, Tanisha Fuller had to convince her hospital caretakers that something was really wrong. Six months pregnant, and unsure of what was happening to her, she’d rushed to the emergency room with pain in her back, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, she was told that…