(note: the lighting is tonight! March 5th – at 8:30pm, more information at thebaylights.org
(BLOUIN ARTINFO:) After more than 75 years in the shadow of its glamorous cousin, San Francisco’s “other” bridge is getting a chance to shine. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been turned into the latest — and by far the biggest — backdrop for New York artist Leo Villareal, who has individually programmed 25,000 white lights spaced a foot apart on 300 of the span’s vertical cables to create what is being billed as the world’s largest illuminated sculpture.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will exhibit five films on Saturday, February 16th as part of its Silent Winter program beginning at 10:30 opening and the screening of Snow White with musical accompaniment Donald Sosin on grand piano. According to the Silent Film Festival promotional material this film was Walt Disney’s original inspiration and is part of The Walt Disney Family Museum’s celebration of Disney’s Snow White. Other films are a selection of Buster Keaton shorts, The Thief of Baghdad, My Best Girl and Faust. Visit the festival site for more information about all of the films and find ticket information.
Speak Your Peace Exhibition and Opening Reception at SOMArts
Bay area painters, along with digital, video and installation artists will be brought together through this exhibiton to explore intercultural communication, social justice and propose new iconographies for peace through visual art at SOMArts in San Francisco. Included works by more than 20 artists and organizations to present cycles of destruction and reconstruction through Japanese-American symbols of identity, draw upon traditional and symbolic Persian and Iranian cultural iconographies, debate the value of the prison-industrial complex in the United States and Cuba, reinterpret historic narratives relating to Salvadorian military histories, expose stories of radical, personal self-expression in the face of persecution through Persian-influenced graffiti installations and discuss the manifold ways popular media informs the way we envision and discuss peace.
news and ideas from writers around the San Francisco Bay Area this week, curated and edited by Mark Gould
Republished to the new good.is platform from YouTube by Thrash Lab:Video: (Empty America) What San Francisco Would Look Like Without Humans. This is both a very beautiful and a kind of creepy, the good kind of creepy, video (as it is intended) … in the sense that it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up; Imagine the world with no people, that’s what Thrash Lab does to beautiful effect using Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere as their tool set – these skilled digital artisans deleted every human and moving car from all the sequences. This short, the first of a series called Empty America, shows every landmark from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman’s Wharf to Lombard Street to Ghirardelli Square to the Bay Bridge, ‘wiped empty of tourists and traffic.
It’s very worth your while taking a look at Thrash Lab’s growing body of work on YouTube where they are accumulating sizable views and apparently, loyal viewers. Links to their web presence elsewhere are on that page. From what I’ve seen so far, quite the talented young group of creatives, hashtag #dreambigger
From Golden Gate Xpress: SF State artist forges storytelling craft by Sean Reichhold
Rather than simply picking one medium to master, April Martin Chartrand has gone so far as to completely create her own art form altogether.
Her art form called ”fiberalchemy,” is her attempt to find the most personal and accurate way of expressing herself. She uses extreme heat or cold to manipulate the texture of painted fabrics to create hardened, colorful sculptures. Chartrand has been using this technique to make anything from earrings and necklaces to hand fans and wall pieces.
Her journey however, began decades ago with a simple sewing machine. (full story ->)
East Bay Express: Noise Pop 2013 Lineup Announced: Toro Y Moi, Amon Tobin, Rogue Wave, and More
Noise Pop is the music festival for people who hate music festivals, i.e. the all-day, drag-out, beer-guzzling, bro-fest that many of the weekend-long music festivals have become. Noise Pop 2013 will take place over six days, Tuesday, Feb. 26 through Sunday, March 3, 2013, and today organizers announced an initial lineup that includes Berkeley resident Toro Y Moi, San Francisco’s Rogue Wave, and experimental DJ extraordinaire Amon Tobin. (full story ->)
Grant will support a six-station public media science reporting collaborative
Contact: Sevda Eris, 415-553-2835, seris@kqed.org
San Francisco, CA — KQED, public media serving Northern California, has been awarded a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a two-year collaborative multimedia science reporting initiative, QUEST Beyond Local. The grant will support KQED and five other public media organizations in creating content under the theme of “Science of Sustainability” on television, radio and the Web, along with educational assets and community outreach. QUEST Beyond Local is scheduled to launch in January.
“We are pleased to see how QUEST, with its history of being organizationally and technologically innovative, is expanding its science reporting model,” said Valentine Kass, acting deputy division director in NSF’s Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings. “QUEST Beyond Local builds new capacity in local and national media channels to address current science and environmental issues with local authority and national relevance.” (full story ->)
A five-year agreement between the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and France’s famed Musée du Louvre could bring priceless works of art to the Bay Area.
Museum officials said the pact will allow for an exchange of antiquities, paintings, sculptures and other objects between the institutions. The Fine Arts Museums operate the Palace of the Legion of Honor and de Young Museum in San Francisco.
“The accord will not only bring forth new scholarship through the collaboration of our colleagues, but it will also give our visitors the opportunity to see great works of art from both museums in ways that would otherwise not be possible,” said Richard Benefield, Fine Arts Museums’ deputy director, in a statement.
Johansson Projects presents SHEBAM! POW! BLOP! WIZZ! featuring work by Rachel Kaye
Artist Rachel Kaye has an upcoming show at Johannson Projects in Oakland beginning November 29th with a reception on December 1st from 3-5pm. Kaye’s textile playgrounds channel the eternally dramatic love affair between art and fashion. Ripped from fashion magazines today’s top trends melt into mazes of color and pattern, pure visual stimulation devoid of opinion or moral stance. As if conducting an operation, Kaye deconstructs the visual fabric of her physical fabrics, letting the symbiosis of art and fashion exist on the same picture plane. Eventually any trace of the textiles’ former life as a clothing object is forgotten as the patterns invite comparisons to graffiti, the internet, hieroglyphics and even technicolor cartography.
Rachel Kaye SHEBAM! POW! BLOP! WIZZ!
Show Runs November 29 – January 12
Reception: Saturday, December 1, 3-5pm Johansson Projects
2300 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland, California 94612
This international group exhibition convenes artists from six cities around the globe that have become burgeoning artistic centers: Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; San Francisco, United States; and Tangier, Morocco. All of these places have active art communities that extend beyond their own regions to become international places of exchange. The exhibition showcases the work of artists who have developed institutions, collectives, or associations that have had a major impact on their respective communities; the contributing artists include Yto Barrada, Tiffany Chung, Wilson Diaz, Futurefarmers, Adrian Ghenie, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Helena Producciones, Lamia Joreige, Dinh Q. Lê, Victor Man, Oscar Muñoz, Ciprian Muresan, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, The Propeller Group, Graziella and Jalal Toufic, and Akram Zaatari. In bringing together work by artists whose efforts have anchored each city’s cultural scene, this exhibition illuminates the dynamic, global, interconnected spirit of 21st-century art.
San Francisco 49er Tight End Vernon Davis is Finally Following his Artistic Heart via Yahoo
Growing up as he did in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood, San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis had artistic interests and talents that were sidetracked by living a hard life on tough streets. Davis avoided art classes in high school, because he thought that his classmates would judge him. “I figured that if I took up art classes, people would look at me differently,” Davis recently told Yahoo! Sports. “I wanted to be cool, and I didn’t know how to adapt at the time. It’s sad, but that’s just the way it was.”
He got his primary support in life from his grandmother, who raised Davis and his siblings. It was when he went to the University of Maryland that things started to come together for him in a football sense. But it was also at Maryland that Davis finally found a way to further his previously hidden interest in art. He changed his major from Criminal Justice to Art Studio, and he was on his way. “I’ve always enjoyed the idea of being an artist,” he said. Davis has set up a visual arts scholarship fund so that young people can know that it’s OK to follow your dreams into art. “You can miss out on a great opportunity if you don’t follow your heart.”
Two Legendary West Coast Artists Reunite…And It Feels So Good
PAPERMAG writes: Now that longtime friends and artists Chris Johanson and Barry McGee have transcended their underground status to become established figures in contemporary art, it seemed appropriate to see what they would have to say to each other all these years later. We’ve known them both for ages, first seeing the mayhem they wrought upon San Francisco in the ’90s as leading figures of what would be known as the Mission School. This was soon after having met them when they began showing at New York’s Alleged Gallery, and following them as they mounted their first spectacle shows at Deitch. In that period of time both artists’ work defined a generation. (full story ->)
Recently I went to the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Center in San Rafael, where the famed Shaolin Warriors of China were to give a performance in display of their hand-to-hand and weapons martial skills. The troupe of 20 Shaolin monks were on the second leg of their fall 2012 North American Tour, and the performance, produced and owned by China Performing Arts Agency Productions, Ltd., was designed to be a dazzling display of gung-fu couched in a “theatrical display” of a “sacred and deadly art.”
Additionally, the Academy of Tae Kwon Do in San Francisco, where I am a student, was accorded a rare, once in a lifetime 15-minute special performance, a quarter hour prior to the show. (read the full review at SF BayView ->)
(SFsthetik.com) CYBERFEST is the first and only Russian annual International festival for cybernetic art (which combines living, biological and somatic substances with computational and technical), held annually since 2007.
This year the festival is attended by more than 80 artists and art professionals from 20 countries (Russia, France, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Germany, Austria, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine , Philippines, etc.), and the program includes: — an exhibition (of media objects and media installations); — live performances; — sound and video art programs; — an educational program (with lectures, workshops, master classes); — an Internet conference; — a concert.
Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has a metaphor for the travel ban that will prevent him attending the growing number of exhibitions of his work being held around the world as his renown increases. “I can swim, but not far,” Ai told AFP of the ban on leaving China imposed last week despite the…
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival will exhibit five films on Saturday, February 16th as part of its
