Engineer's Daughter

notes from the weekend

• I was thrilled to hear the Cantor was getting the Morris Hirshfield exhibition that received such rave reviews at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and it does not disappoint. Hirshfield was a self-taught artist who came to painting late in life for a brief but prolific career, and his animals and nude ladies are utterly bewitching.
• Meanwhile Hansol Jung's Wolf Play at Shotgun is also well worth your time as it tells the story of a young Korean adoptee who processes his feelings by imagining he is more lupine than human. As always Shotgun does some really stunning tricks with the staging, and the cast also features some of our local best.

notes from the weekend

• I swung by Minnesota Street on Saturday for the final day of their beautiful group exhibition The Deeper We Sunk in Dreams, curated by Lexygius Sanchez Calip and featuring recent work from 2020 SF Art Institute artists whose term was interrupted by pandemic and who stayed local after the school unceremoniously closed. The show is a tribute to the artists' persistence and an elegy to an institution that nurtured so many important ideas. And while I was in the building I had to pop into Hashimoto Contemporary to visit Lorien Stern's ceramic dinosaurs in her Old Friends show, because who doesn't love cheerful ceramic dinosaurs?
• I also leapt at the chance to support Maui and hear some amazing Hawaiian musicians besides at the Freight & Salvage Sunday evening, at a benefit concert that featured Mahealani Uchiyama, Patrick Landeza (who also emceed), Faith Ako, and Steven Espaniola. There was a lot of laughter and a few tears and some truly gorgeous hula alongside the music, and in the end the audience raised over $25,000 to send to Lahaina.

notes from the weekend

• If you haven't been to the San José Museum of Art recently now is a fabulous time to visit, with wonderful solo exhibitions by certified legend Yolanda López and the Bay Area's own Sadie Barnette that I've highlighted before and now a brand new group show called Nuts and Who's: A Candy Store Sampler. The latter features work from artists allied with Adeliza McHugh’s Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, and the 1960s-era California ceramics alone are worth the journey down the peninsula.
• Then after my surprise KALX DJ shift yesterday morning I grabbed a veggie weenie from Top Dog and headed back to Walnut Creek for the second Sunday afternoon in a row, this time to see the delightful Lamplighters production of Il Ducato, which is basically The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan transplanted to Milan and reworked to remove the racism. They made a few other fun tweaks along the way, such as the inclusion of modern-day villains in "I've Got a Little List" that had the audience literally cheering with glee.

notes from the weekend

• Only one gallery visit this weekend but it was a fantastic one: The compelling group exhibition Rabbit Hole at the Berkeley Art Center, curated by Adrianne Ramsey. Thematically linked by perceptions of space, the work in the show from a diverse array of artists was all created within the last few years and deals head-on with the cultural issues that have been swirling in our collective ether.
• The other highlight of my weekend was Festival Opera's refreshing version of Bizet's Carmen, in a production that successfully blended 2023 Oakland with 1820 Seville complete with turf dancing instead of flamenco. All of leads were stupendous and non-binary mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz blew the roof off as Carmen, playing the character less as a femme fatale than simply as a woman who knows her own mind and heart and refuses to waver.

notes from the weekend

• So much good art this weekend! Starting at Wendi Norris for Leo Marz's Modern Office show. The architecture depicted in Marz's surrealist paintings dissolves and folds in on itself as human and animal forms seem to flicker in and out. After a few years of reassessing my own relationship to interior and exterior spaces, these pieces spoke to me in a major way.
• Artist Sholeh Asgary often works with sound, and in her ongoing Audio Archive Booth in the lobby at Yerba Buena she invites members of the Iranian diaspora to commit their memories and thoughts to tape recorder. I appreciate that both Asgary and Yerba Buena are creating space during a time of continuing turmoil and protest in Iran.
• Over at SFMOMA the second floor remains free to the general public and includes the fantastic new exhibit Sitting on Chrome with work by Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales that is inspired by lowrider culture in California. The trio's exuberant paintings and sculptures feel barely contained by the museum, and in one room they have collaborated on an immersive sound and light installation that brought back vivid memories of '90s SoCal parking lot parties. And if you do pay for admission head straight to the 7th floor to see the Frank Bowling retrospective. It is exquisite.
• Down at Gallery 16 Still, the Meandering Path pairs the final works by the late great Jim Melchert with contemporary ceramics artists, many of them influenced by Melchert, in a strikingly beautiful and very emotional show. It was wonderful to pay tribute to Melchert and also marvel at the new work while appreciating how the Bay Area remains the place where ceramics pushes boundaries and pushes forward.
• Finally the annual Root Division Introductions show has long been a place to spot the best up-and-coming artists in the Bay Area, and this year's iteration is chock full of amazing work indeed. The non-profit is not just a gallery; they also provide studio space for artists and classes for the community, and it makes me so happy to see them still doing their thing in the heart of SF.

notes from the weekend

• The current group exhibition at Palo Alto Art Center, Earth, has a clear environmental agenda and for that I am grateful. The show features Northern California artists working in almost every conceivable medium, and whether they were directly grappling with our current climate catastrophe or simply highlighting the beauty of our home planet, I was inspired and galvanized in turn.
• While I was in Palo Alto I had planned to drop by the former Pace Gallery space to see Mitchell Johnson's colorful paintings...but I wrote the closing date of his show down wrong (oops) and found myself peering into an empty gallery. I pivoted by grabbing an iced coffee from Philz and enjoying it in the Gamble Garden, not a terrible way to spend a beautiful afternoon.
• This weekend I also visited the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek and had my mind blown by their Sight Unseen show, which features photography from an international array of blind artists. Some of them are using assistive technology, some are using instinct or what vision remains, but every artist has a distinctive voice.

notes from the weekend

• My art wanderings found me close to home in Oakland this weekend, starting with the Open Source show at Gearbox Gallery that features work by Maria Porges and Harry Clewans in a fascinating juxtaposition between Porges's ceramic vase-shaped sculptures and pieces by Clewans composed of wood-block prints that have been combined into imagined landscapes and interiors. As the title of the exhibition suggests, both artists pull from cultural artifacts and reconfigure them into something personal and new.
• Meanwhile over at Slate Contemporary a trio of artists seem to bend photons themselves in their work in a show entitled Catching Light. I was utterly smitten by the gradations of color in Jenn Shifflet's abstract oil paintings and glass pieces, and I also loved Kana Tanaka's chunky glass installations alongside large-scale sunset photography by Thea Schrack. The whole mood created in the gallery is decidedly meditative.
• Saturday night I returned to the theater at BAMPFA for the first time since pandemic for one of my fave Preston Sturges films, The Lady Eve, complete with a special introduction by Sturges scholar Stuart Klawans. What a treat to laugh along to the onscreen antics with a sold-out audience too.
• And then yesterday afternoon I took advantage of the fact that the 2023 West Edge Opera Festival is being held walking distance from my apartment at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center and went to go see their glorious production of The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi. This former classics major delighted in all of the ancient Roman intrigue onstage...and tried not to think too hard about the real-life Poppea's fate as she and Nero sang their ever-so-gorgeous duet at the end.

notes from the weekend

• Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a huge cheerleader for Headlands Center for the Arts, and mercifully their Graduate Fellowship program made it through the pandemic intact. The 2022-23 awardees have a wonderful show up at The Lab right now as the culmination of their year-long residency at Headlands, and it's a great cheat sheet for which artists to keep your eye on as they embark on their careers post-grad-school. Rumor has it that Headlands will be doing more programming in S.F. in future, and it's so wonderful to see art back at The Lab again too!
• While I was in the neighborhood I took a stroll down a car-free Valencia to City Art Cooperative Gallery, which is still going strong after 25 years. I remember when they opened just after I'd moved to the Bay Area myself, and I always recommend popping in to find an affordable piece of art or to chat with the artists behind the counter.
• My final stop for the day was the Haight Street Art Center, where in the current exhibition Dawn State collaborative artists Monica Canilao and Xara Thustra have used Reuben Kadish's trippy on-site WPA mural as a jumping-off point for their own exuberant installations. The show also includes life-size queer icons by Silky Shoemaker and artwork by Samedi Djeimguero and Adam Ansell, and the joyful, defiant chaos will leave you feeling uplifted indeed.

notes from the weekend

• Undeterred by 91-degree heat, perhaps foolishly, I made a couple of inspiring stops in San José this weekend starting with the Museum of Quilts & Textiles for their Queer Threads group exhibition. Featuring a multitude of contemporary West Coast artists loosely linked by their queer identity and work in fiber arts, the show embodies a lot of sass and joy and humor along with more sobering moments, as with the inclusion of a small portion of the AIDS Quilt.
• And just down the street the Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist retrospective at the San José Museum of Art is a bona fide showstopper and a worthy tribute to an important and influential feminist icon. I loved López's monumental drawings of herself, her mother, and her grandmother, but her more intimate paintings and collages are wonderful too. Sadie Barnette's very cool Family Business installation is still up at the museum too, just follow your ears.

the great animal orchestra

Run don't walk to experience The Great Animal Orchestra at the Exploratorium right now, a gorgeous installation that melds the amazing field recordings Bernie Krause has been archiving for the last 50+ years with a mesmerizing visualization of the sounds you are hearing. Divided into segments that range around the world and under our oceans, the Orchestra shows you the waveforms wildlife create in a continually-scrolling spectrogram. It is sheer pleasure to immerse yourself in the sounds of the natural world (the howling coyotes in one segment brought tears of happiness to my eyes), but Krause is also intent on showing what happens when we don't protect these habitats and allow them to succumb to drought, to logging, to bleaching, as in the sobering "Before/After" segment that opens the entire piece. If you prefer your Exploratorium with only adults and no kids you can attend one of their Thursday evening After Dark sessions, as my friends and I did last night, and in our case we were also able to catch an incredible talk by Krause and Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington. They reflected on their personal histories with sound and mused about the importance of listening, and above all emphasized how we need to preserve biodiversity and reverse the damage we've done.

Masking? A smattering of masks, which is probably just where we're going to be from here on out.