Culture
For 22 years, the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) has focused on providing art instruction and community outreach for the children of Oakland. This month, the Old Oakland museum staff and board members found themselves embroiled in what one board member described as “the most contentious issue on the planet.”
At the Eat Real Festival in Oakland’s Jack London Square on Saturday afternoon, crowds of people gathered on the waterfront, queuing up for $4 miniature sweet-potato pies and $5 citrus pork sandwiches on organic, brick oven flatbread. But in front of Bay Area Bikes, four cyclists had a different idea—riding gloves were slipped on, four helmet locks clicked shut, and the group rode away from the food festival to get an inside look at some of Oakland’s local food and drink makers.
The scent of locally-raised barbeque meat, organic Asian Fusion cuisine, and many other tasty bites cooked by dozens of food trucks is wafting over Jack London Square for the third annual Eat Real Festival this weekend.
How much life passes through one cubic foot of water in the San Francisco Bay every day? Photographer David Liittschwager set out to answer that question over the course of 14 days this past spring. From a small sailboat anchored in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, he and a team of scientists collected and photographed whatever plants and animals were carried by the bay’s currents into a metal square-foot cube submerged in the upper water column.
The Nightcap is a new series that will feature a favorite Oakland drinking establishment every Friday afternoon. This week, it’s Kim’s Backyard. Kim Okwa Janke opened up Kim’s Backyard, a bar on Telegraph at 24th Street, because she was retired and wanted to party. She insists it’s really as simple as that.
You never know what to expect from the Oakland Underground Film Festival. From Kung fu and female wrestlers to hip-hop and community gardens, this film festival has got it all. The event is being held this week, from Thursday to Saturday, in East Oakland.
The third annual annual Eat Real Festival’s organizers hope the event is so much fun you’ll forget it’s reshaping your assumptions about food. The free event in Jack London Square this weekend, which is billed as half street festival, half block party, will feature local music and film screenings alongside food workshops, demonstrations, contests and scores of vendors.
Home movies are easy to define. According to Pamela Jean Vadakan, a former film collection assistant at the Pacific Film Archive, home movies are “personal moving images shot by an amateur (non-professional) of familiar subjects and familiar places.”
Giant dove puppets made from bed sheets were lofted high by youth brandishing them as signs of peace at this Sunday’s Roots & Shoots International Day of Peace event at the Oakland Zoo. The doves, held together by wooden poles and duct tape, their large eyes outlined with acrylic paint, looked down over the meadow as hundreds of attendees turned the ninth annual celebration into a day-long festival engaging youth in educational arts and crafts activities, like making piñatas for the primates at the zoo.