Beauty has a sordid history in art. Once held up as the most essential aesthetic principle, beauty has been championed, diminished, and had to fight for its value. An esthetic of pain has taken center stage in twentieth and twenty-first century art, emphasizing artists who express or parse personal struggle in their work, often correlating…
This month playwright/lyricist, Diane Sampson, and musician/cabaret performer, Lauren Mayer, will unveil what they accomplished during the pandemic. Living Large, their musical about the lives and loves of Marie Dressler, will debut on December 10 and 11 as a reading at the Potrero Stage Theater. Though Bay Area artists Sampson and Mayer had admired each…
The United States is commonly thought of as a nation of immigrants, but it’s also a nation of colonizers. Brooklyn-based artist, Maia Cruz Palileo, explores this tension in Long Kwento, a haunting exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art. Palileo’s focus is on American colonization…
Pier 24, located on the Embarcadero, is offering visitors the opportunity to see more of its collection than ever before. Exhibitions at the prominent photography museum typically revolve around one or two artists or a strong curatorial theme. Looking Back: Ten Years of Pier 24 Photography, through December 31, tosses these limitations in favor of…
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 based on the belief that the study of art was central to education. Over the years notable faculty and students included textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers, experimental composer John Cage, and San Francisco sculpture superstar Ruth Asawa. Although the school closed in 1957 it had an outsized…
San Francisco art galleries are offering by-appointment viewing of exhibitions originally scheduled to open last spring. Seven Rivers – which was supposed to start accepting visitors in March at Euqinom Gallery on Alabama Street – is an expansive journey in experimental landscape pictures from Idaho photographer Ansley West Rivers. In 2013, West Rivers set out…
I moved to Dogpatch about eight years ago and hated it. It seemed far away from my previous Downtown home. I was used to rolling out of bed and having everything I needed within walking distance. Food is my raison d’être; my biggest worry was finding new restaurants. I went on a date at a…
Many of us have had experiences that’re hard to explain based on known science. Someone we haven’t spoken to or thought about in years abruptly pops into our mind, only to text, call, or appear in front of us on the street shortly thereafter. Alone or in a crowded place we become awash with a…
The University of California, San Francisco-Mission Bay Memory and Aging Center is an apt setting to exhibit paintings by Potrero Hill artist Sofia Carmi, who produced the works while healing from the recent loss of her long-time husband, artist Brent Bushnell. Abstract art often attempts to connect the inner world of feelings and memories with…
Nearly half a century has passed since the 1969 disaster that was California’s riotous Altamont Speedway Free Festival, the bizarro-world Woodstock that claimed the lives of four of its attendees. The racetrack where five of the world’s most notable rock bands played to an audience of delirious acid trippers and rowdy biker gangs now sits…
Production of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment – through October 15 – by Crowded Fire Theater at Potrero Hill’s Thick House marks only the third Bay Area staging of the work of the Brooklyn-based experimental dramatist the New York Times called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” It was here, however, that Lee—a…
The electronic rock band Fifty Foot Hose emerged from San Francisco’s iconic 1960s music scene. Its music, including its sole album, Cauldron, issued in 1967, was influenced by a mixture of jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and electronic music. The latter genre’s current popularity was sparked by pioneers such as Cork Marcheschi, a Bay Area…
In 2007 Phil Klay was deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province. During his six month’s serving as a Marine public affairs officer Klay gathered stories for his book Redeployment, which won this year’s National Book Award. I read Redeployment, with great interest; Klay and I both served in Iraq during the troop surge. In Redeployment Klay…
The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which opens in Los Angeles and New York on August 7, is about sex. More specifically, it’s about a feverish waking sex dream: that riptide of deep physical and emotional longing that washes over adolescents cum teenagers just when they’re painfully piecing their identity together. Something like it happens…
As a young boy growing up in New Jersey Jerry Barrish didn’t know anything about art. His home was completely devoid of it; there were no trips to museums. But all that changed when Barrish, now one of the Bay Area’s most admired sculptors, moved with his family to San Francisco. “At eight years old…