News
Oldest San Francisco Arts Nonprofit Suspends Curatorial Programs
SAN FRANCISCO — Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco’s oldest alternative arts space, has suspended curatorial programs and halved its staff, KQED reported last week.
San Francisco
Art
The Inescapable Sounds of the Everyday
SAN FRANCISCO — I visited during a hell of a week for the City by the Bay. With temperatures soaring into the 90s, the sounds of fans, ice cream trucks, and San Franciscans complaining about the heat wave and lack of air-conditioning filled the air.
News
Tech Boom Brings San Francisco Gallery Diaspora
Months before his death in 2011, Steve Jobs told a crowd gathered for the unveiling of the iPad 2: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
Art
Google to Hang Its Doodle in San Francisco's Mission District
In the Bay Area, where Silicon Valley's private-shuttle ingenues are a nightmare vanguard to low-income residents in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, Google has taken the unprecedented step of directly leasing office space in one such area: San Francisco's Mission district.
Opinion
Art, Tech, and Gentrification in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO — As fleets of shuttle buses take employees to their respective Silicon Valley campuses, resentment and tension grows in the Bay Area. Last week, protesters blocked one such Google bus in an effort to draw attention to the widening gap between the technology industry and the communitie
Art
Mapping San Francisco's Literary History
OAKLAND, Calif. — San Francisco has become a city of gadgets, but it's always been a city of letters. The town was central to the Beat movement in the 50's, and the recent, city-wide SF Lit Crawl shed light on its wide variety of independent bookstores.
Opinion
San Francisco Bay Bridge Turns into the World's Largest Light Installation
The western span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge is coming alive. Starting March 5, it will light up nightly with 25,000 LEDs strung along its network of support cables, turning into the largest light sculpture in the world. In a preliminary test video of the installation by American artist Leo Vill
Interview
Painting the Homeless
BERKELEY, California — Hugh Leeman’s work didn’t immediately impress me. It had a distinct Bay Area style, which is not my personal favorite — his paintings are loose, colorful, street art–influenced, and have some realistic surrealism mixed in — but what caught my attention in Leeman’s practice was
Art
Ferris Bueller, Vodkamelons, and Other Youthful Follies
BERKELEY, California — Adam Parker Smith's new show Forever 21 at Ever Gold Gallery is an investigation of youthful aesthetics taken seriously.
Art
The Dangers of Crowd Funding Art
In a recent panel, San Francisco's Artstech contingent explored the power of crowd-funding for art. The discussion drove me to a question: How can we help solve some of the problems of crowd-funding and avoid Kickstarter burnout?
Art
Impressions from SFMOMA: A Photo Essay
BERKELEY, California — I just moved to Berkeley, California after living in Brooklyn for two years and the second arts institution I visited was SFMoMA (the first was the Luggage Store gallery but I didn't have my camera with me). The museum is not unpleasant but has an odd construction with a consi
Art
Monastic, Psychedelic and Party Time
Mark Warren Jacques’s paintings are equal parts pop and mysticism; they linger between the monastic the psychedelic and party time. A Portland-based artist, his works assert themselves with a clearly defined West Coast swagger. They beam light straight into your head, they knock you down with colorf