Engineer's Daughter

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Free Oakland UP

Holiday malaise got you down? Have I got some ideas for you!

• Tucked into an unassuming strip mall in Oakland's Dimond district, Free Oakland UP is a wondrous little "shop" where every visitor is welcome to one free item. The project is the brainchild of Jocelyn Meggait, created as a social experiment, and when I visited on Friday it felt like the perfect antidote to the rampant shopping going on elsewhere in the country. Take your time selecting your free item, check out the work in the gallery area by the current artist-in-residence, and buy an artfully-potted plant to help Maggait pay the rent. Then bop across the parking lot to get a quart of lemon chiffon at local ice cream legend Loard's...and I hear that the framer and mechanic in that same lot are awesome too.
• Meanwhile, down in Uptown, Windy Chien has a beautiful show of knots and splices at Local Language called Mutations. Grab a seasonal cocktail from the in-house tasting room to enhance your viewing experience and marvel at Chien's sculptural, textural pieces, which are deceptive in their simplicity.
• Further afield but well worth the drive, the San José Museum of Art has two unique exhibitions up right now I highly recommend. The first is the group show Other Walks, Other Lines, which begins with a quote about walking from Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust and spirals outwards from there to explore the many ways traveling by foot can be a source of inspiration, a form of protest, or a way to inadvertently court danger. The second is an epic solo exhibition on the second floor by Dinh Q. Lê entitled True Journey Is Return, and you could easily spend a couple hours exploring the varied narratives Lê has assembled about the Vietnamese experience.
• Coming up this Thursday, author Jose Antonio Vargas stops by Yerba Buena to chat with artist Jerome Reyes about the art-billboard Reyes currently has installed at the center and probably some other things besides. Alley Cat Books will also be selling copies of Vargas's Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen if you'd like to get a copy signed.
• And last but definitely not least, all this week the Recombinant Festival will be bringing extraordinary sounds and visuals to the Mission. Pick any night to attend; you cannot go wrong.

matokie mix 11.25.18

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public matters

Janet Delaney

Through December 22 - Janet Delaney: Public Matters at Euqinom Gallery. Back when I moved to San Francisco in 1997 the Mission was my stomping-ground, full of scrappy storefront galleries and bookshops, independent performance spaces and theaters, local bars and restaurants (I still miss you, Ti Couz!). Today gentrification has completely changed the tone of the neighborhood, though the old Mission is still there if you know where to look, and if you avoid the hipster takeover that is Valencia Street. Or transport yourself to mid-80s San Francisco with this exhibition of Janet Delaney's extraordinary street photographs, and remember a time when Reagan was president but the Bay Area remained an oasis of radical thought and action. Delaney celebrates the city's diversity in her images of marches and weekend celebrations, capturing the faces at SF's first MLK parade or a couple cruising down 24th Street. The photographs serve as a fascinating time capsule, but also link us to our present-day struggles and joys. The Euqinom show coincides with the publication of a monograph of Delaney's photographs by Mack Books, and in a deft move the gallery has copy out for visitors to write in as a kind of guest book, with an invitation for anyone to add commentary or their own memories. Delaney will be at the gallery in person on Thursday, November 29, for an artist lecture and signing, and also don't miss a "La Mission" poetry reading with Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cathy Arellano, Valentina Lopez Cortes, and Josiah Luis Alderete on Saturday, December 1. 

matokie mix 11.18.18

mix

take action

Sharon Daniel

Through November 16 - Take Action / A For Freedoms Exhibition at CCA Hubbell St Galleries. I emerged from the midterms this week with a sense of cautious optimism about the progress made, and also with a clear view of what we need to keep working hard to change: voter suppression and racism, just for starters. The timing was perfect therefore for me to see this bracing exhibition of recent political work by an array of local artists. Many of the pieces have a participatory component, as when Christine Wong Yap encourages you to think of a place you feel like you belong and then place it on a map, or in Stephanie Syjuco's subversive FREE TEXTS installation that deliberately sends visitors to websites where copyrighted writing can be read and downloaded. Activism is a strong theme throughout as well, and I loved how Taraneh Hemami's metal People Power stencils created such an effective visual statement when hanging in a row on the wall but could also be taken down and very practically used to make protest signs and such. I was also quite moved by Sharon Daniel's UNDOING TIME installations, pictured above, which upend the meaning of MAGA hats and the American flag to comment on prisoners' rights and sweatshop labor in our criminal justice system. I thought specifically of the 1 million individuals who just had their voting rights restored in Florida and felt the tiniest twinge of hope for the future.

 

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