Culture
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,…
Unbeknownst to many, Oakland has a secret: it’s bursting at the seams with women who love women. According to the Gay and Lesbian Atlas, which used information compiled from the 2000 U.S. census, Oakland contains the highest concentration of lesbian couples of any city in the nation and has the second highest number of same-sex couple households– right behind San Francisco. So even as the biggest Bay Area events of Gay Pride Day will take place in San Francisco this…
Oakland residents dusted off their zoot suits, feathered hats and shiny, sequined dresses Saturday night for the third annual cabaret benefit performance of the Oakland-East Bay Gay Men’s Chorus at the First Christian church in Oakland.
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…
About 200 people braved the chilly summer evening and brought their lawn chairs, dogs and sleeping bags to 49th and Telegraph on Thursday night, for the kick-off of the second annual opening of the Temescal Street Cinema series. The event started off small. At 8 p.m. several empty plastic chairs were set up facing a brick wall and the popcorn popper wasn’t working properly. A couple, draped in blankets, ate take-out Mexican food and waited patiently for the sky to…
For someone like me who does not have a car and has never driven, choosing a route to explore Oakland’s art scene was difficult. I decided to focus on art galleries along Telegraph Avenue. It turned out that Oakland is a walker-friendly art city. I started out from The Warehouse at 416 26 St. where I was greeted by Jana Grover‘s Broken Mind series. If there had not been an artist’s name nearby, I might have thought they were…
With 400 artists to choose from and more than a few in North Oakland, it was difficult to decide which studios to drop by on the last Saturday of this event. I didn’t want to waste my time driving around – it’s not often that you get the opportunity to chit-chat in your artist-neighbor’s living room or garden while eating cheese with toothpicks and checking out their ultra-private oeuvre. I chose to comb over a small square of the crowded…
Gilbert De Jesus remembers where he was when he heard last week’s news that the California Supreme Court upheld the proposition that changed the state constitution to outlaw gay marriage. The general manager of the White Horse Inn – established in 1932 and serving as one of the oldest gay and lesbian bars in the United States—was in the back office. “I’m really disgusted,” said De Jesus, who is among the 18,000 couples married after the California court upheld gay…
At the age of eight, Adrienne Wander is already a food connoisseur. “As far as quality goes, Ici is the best, Tara’s vanilla is great,” said the elementary school foodie licking her favorite Dreyer’s Fudge Track. She knows her ice cream, in part a result of living near creamery row on College Avenue. The commercial corridor is home to Dreyer’s, which created Rocky Road in 1929 after the stock market crash, Ici Ice Cream, the hip and gourmet parlor, which …