notes from the weekend

• There was a big art fair in town this weekend, but J and I completely avoided it and hit up a gallery and a couple museums instead. We started out at Johansson Projects on Saturday, still one of my favorite spaces in Oakland after all of these years. Right now they're showing Nicole Irene Anderson, whose gripping surreal-edged paintings combine landscape, flora, and architecture into scenes that feel distinctly Californian and very of-the-moment. 
• After a morning hike at Sycamore Valley Open Space Regional Preserve and our traditional Sunday brunch at Tacos Oscar, we headed into the city to see Soleé Darrell’s Cosmic Ceremony exhibit at MoAD. Darrell's luminous abstractions are exactly the type of artworks that need to be seen in person to fully appreciate how she has applied paint directly onto velvet, joyously smearing and spattering color. Also MoAD will be closed from March to September of this year to do some upgrades, but keep an eye on their schedule for programming they'll be doing out in the community.
• From MoAD we bopped next door to SFMoMA and headed straight up to the Amy Sherald: American Sublime special exhibition which was nothing short of revelatory. I was predictably laid flat by the portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, neither of which I had known was in the show, but every single one of her paintings speak volumes about Black humanity. It was wonderful to proceed directly from Sherald to the Consuelo Kanaga Catch the Spirit exhibit and feel similarly moved by her ability to address social justice issues through her extraordinary photographs. Next up we visited the 2024 SECA Art Award show where a trio local artists I adore were each given a room to display recent work, and each one of them completely knocked it out of the park. Rupy C. Tut reconfigures classic Indian paintings into a modern context, foregrounding women, while Rose D'Amato uses her mad sign painting skills to reference the history and culture of the Mission, and Angela Hennessy's installation of wreaths woven from black and white synthetic hair is devastating in its beauty and poignancy. Last but definitely not least we spent a whole bunch of quality time in the rad Unity through Skateboarding exhibit curated by Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez, founders of the skate collective Unity, and simply chock full of amazing skating photos and ephemera and art including a beautiful Margaret Kilgallen piece (who was herself a skater). By the way the SECA show is completely free to visit, as are the current Kara Walker and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon installations.