Culture
The Oakland Asian Cultural Center welcomed the Year of the Snake at its annual Lunar New Year event in downtown Oakland on Saturday. The 2013 festival showcased dance and musical performances from groups throughout the Bay Area’s Asian community, including the Rising Dragon Culture Center Lion Dance Troupe, who opened the show with dragons prancing around. Students of Seibi Lee, the center’s artist-in-residence preformed Kathak, a classical dance from India, while Winnie Wong and Diana Rowan played the harp and the piano. Throughout…
“How would you like to have husbands who have testicles that weigh 14 percent of their body weight?” asked Harry Santi to a handful of women at the Oakland Zoo on Friday.
He isn’t talking about any sort of terrifying medical anomaly here. Santi, 81, a docent at the Oakland Zoo, is referring to the tuberous bushcricket, a type of tiny katydid, and one of dozens of animals with unusual, peculiar, or fascinating sex lives that were highlighted at Oakland Zoo’s annual Animal Amore this Valentine’s Day.
Welcome to the debut photo gallery for The Pulse of Oakland. Oakland North reporters will be taking photographs documenting each of the ZIP codes in Oakland over the next few months. Every neighborhood is diverse and different, and we want to capture that. This week’s featured ZIP code is 94601 in East Oakland. The area includes Fruitvale, Peralta Hacienda and other neighborhoods. Of course, we can’t see everything in Oakland ourselves. So we also want to know how you view this…
It’s Saturday afternoon at the African American Museum in Oakland, and archivist Sean Heyliger is showing a small group how best to preserve and care for old photos as part of an open house for Black History Month.
City leaders met with First Friday stakeholders again Tuesday night to discuss the future of the city’s most popular art festival, which could lead to several changes next month’s event.
With its new series, “In-the-Mix: Music Tour,” the Oakland Museum of California is offering a new way for lovers of the arts to experience the works of visual arts, masters and musicians. Each part of the series is the musical tour of the museum’s galleries given by musicians who will stroll through them and interpret the objects and the experience for themselves.
You won’t often come across three accomplished koto players in one place—let alone in the same family. But Oakland is home to three generations of musicians who have dedicated their lives to the music of the Japanese harp.
“One, two, three” says Ben Ofori to a neat pile of fifth graders sitting cross-legged in front of him at the Eastmont Library. They squirm a little, but mostly stare in wide-eyed wonder at the man in brightly colored clothes.
Nearly a week after the post-First Friday festival shooting that killed 18-year-old Kiante Campbell and wounded 3 others, event organizers say they’re waiting for a cue from the city about how to proceed. City of Oakland officials have called a meeting with the festival’s key stakeholders for Thursday to examine ways to keep future events safe. The art festival that takes over swaths of downtown Oakland on the first Friday of each month started as a humble gallery walk in…