Centuries before Leonardo da Vinci lived and worked in Italy, a Persian astronomer, physician, geographer and writer was conducting research into the nature of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Zakariya al-Qazwini (d. 1283) wrote and illustrated The Wonders of...
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s world is inhabited by creatures that suggest genetic engineering gone awry or the infusion of sentience in hitherto inanimate objects. Her hyper-realistic sculptures combine elements of human form blended with those of animals,...
Oakland-based Swedish-American artist Michele Pred achieved notoriety in the early 2000s for her conceptual sculptural installations of items like Swiss Army knives and manicure scissors confiscated by airport security. Pred’s witty and dramatic work, with a strong...
Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George...
Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of Oakland-based artist and curator Leila Weefur, how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, “Prey†Play.” Presented in two...
The centuries-old practice of Kintsugi, a Japanese technique of mending broken pottery with gold, honors the flaws in the ceramic piece. The artist Jim Melchert, who taught English in Japan for four years, has long appreciated and employed that aesthetic. For more...
Nam June Paik, the “father of video art” and the man who coined the phrase “the electronic superhighway,” weaves humor, Buddhism, technology, music and sex. Paik was born in 1932 in Japanese-occupied Korea. Tutored in piano and composition, he attended college at the...
Influential Northern California artist William T. Wiley passed away on April 25 in Greenbrae, CA. His combination of irreverence and spirituality so keenly reflected the spirit of our times, where we don't know quite what to believe, but would all like to believe in...
Elizabeth Rodini’s Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (2020) landed on my radar through meeting Rodini last year at the American Academy in Rome, where she is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. Rodini’s recent object biography investigates a number of...
Like many of us, I have spent much of the past nine months or so huddled in front of my computer. One day, an email arrived that really caught my eye. It was from 8-bridges—an organization I had never heard of—inviting me to save...
Growing up as a queer Black child in the Jim Crow era South, Ramekon O’Arwisters and his family had many barriers to overcome. His grandmother, recognizing that the young boy was “a bit of a hot mess,” one day called him over and invited him to work with her on her...
Rather than pursuing variations on by now familiar themes, the Sacramento and Emeryville-based Robert Ortbal follows a path that may well twist into an entirely different dimension. Recently you might find the serious and intellectual Ortbal wearing an oversized dog...
“How to Fall in Love in a Brothel” offers a mix of the experiential and the conceptual, expressed as an interactive sculptural installation and an HD video. A collaboration between artists Ellen Sebastian Chang, Sunhui Chang and Maya Gurantz, the idea of a “brothel”...
When Ann Weber began working on her current series of monumental sculptures made from recycled cardboard, vitriolic rhetoric about constructing a border wall dominated the news. Trying to grapple with the idea, her research led her in a surprising direction, to Pink...
Ever since man created robots, there have arisen ethical and moral questions regarding when and how they should be used. Isaac Asimov created the concept of the Three Laws of Robots in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” the first of which stipulated that a robot was...
“Inter-Natural,” the title of Patricia Piccinini’s solo exhibition, links two ideas, “inter” implying spaces between, and “natural” the realm of unspoiled nature. For over two decades, the Australian artist has been exploring just this liminal space, where nature...
“I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.” Andy Warhol In 2014, The Warhol Foundation gifted its hefty archive of 3,600 contact sheets shot by Warhol in the late 1970s and early to mid-’80s to Stanford University, under the care of...
“Dark Landscapes for a White House,” Deborah Oropallo’s solo exhibition at Catharine Clark, presents a moody, dysfunctional picture of contemporary society in nine large-scale works in photomontage, pigment print, and paint on paper, complemented by a quartet of...
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