Results tagged “art”

FILM: The Oakland Underground Film Festival presents the San Francisco premiere of Black Dynamite, an action-packed comedy rooted in the traditions of American Blaxploitation and Kung Fu films, such as Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972), and The Mack (1974). According to Sundance Film Festival, the film "sustains the comedy while taking a nice big sucker punch at the underlying politics of our time." Director Scott Sanders and co-writer/star Michael Jai White will appear in person at the screening.

FILM: Director Barry Jenkins joins SF Film Society Director Graham Leggat for a screening of Medicine for Melancholy and a conversation afterwards. M4M, which was shot in a mere three weeks and made its West Coast Premiere at the 2008 SF International Film Festival, is a "love story of bikes and one-night stands told through two African-American twenty-somethings dealing with issues of class, identity and the evolving conundrum of being a minority in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco - the city with the smallest proportional black population of any major American city."

ART: Artist Paul Madonna will debut his annual publication, Album, along with an exhibit of his corresponding large-scale, pen-and-ink drawings of '70s and '80s era toys, which serve as a catalog to the book. In the smaller Electric Works gallery, artist Ian Huebert will exhibit his images from an "(imagined?) Plain States landscape." The exhibit runs through January 9, 2010.

Artist Toban Nichols -- a former San Francisco resident who recently exchanged his Bay Area lifestyle for LA's expansive and creative community -- has three shows that will take over the Bay Area over the next two months. His work, as he describes it, "favors bright color, along with databending and media manipulation, with an eye focused on both current and nostalgic popular culture moments and icons."

GALA: AIGA San Francisco presents Hung up, its annual fall gala. This year, AIGA celebrates the art of skateboarding and has invited its members to contribute custom skate decks, which will be auctioned off at the end of the night. The event also features a live art component and a raffle with prizes including posters, restaurant vouchers, magazine subscriptions, and a copy of Adobe CS4.

Veteran San Francisco photographer Gerald Ratto will exhibit his rarely seen collection of photographs, Children of the Fillmore, 1952, which he captured with his Rolleiflex camera while a student at California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute). The photography program was founded by Ansel Adams in 1945.

MUSIC: Alternative Tentacles have been celebrating their 30th Anniversary with an Incest-A-Thon this weekend. Tonight's line-up is Alice Donut, Victims Family, and Burning Image.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Evolution of a Painter at George Krevsky Gallery, Exploration and Celebration Finale at Sandra Gallery, C3, Akira, KMNDZ at Shooting Gallery, plus many more.

VIDEO: Check out the West Coast premiere of Target Video's SF Punk, as part of the SF Main Library's Punk Passages exhibit. The film features Bay Area early punk legends The Avengers, Dead Kennedys, DILS, Crime, Nuns, Flipper, Factrix, Noh Mercy, Minimal Man, Chrome, Offs, Z, UXA, Sick Pleasure, KGB, Negative Trend, The Mutants, and the Sleepers. A Q&A with videographer Joe Rees and photographer Ruby Ray will follow.

THEATER: Comedian and playwright Rick Reynolds presents his hilarious and gut-wrenching personal confessions and childhood remembrances in Love, God, Sex (and and other stuff I don’t have), which is directed by Jason Alexander.

Before we begin, "Steven Free" is a far better name than "Girafa." It's action-packed! But since male artists love, love, love using stage names, he obviously had to get a new one; after all, he was committing illegal acts of painting. We digress.

ART: Women's Art Movement (W.A.M.) explores the scary and sweet sides of pop-surrealism in their latest group show, Dollhouse Monsters invade Polk Gulch. The participating artists of W.A.M. will be disguised in pre-Halloween costumes for the festivities, and encourage attendees to dress in costume as well. Everyone who stops by the gallery will be entered in a costume contest to win an iPod. The exhibition runs through November 7.

Saturday marks the SOMA/downtown installment of SF Open Studios. All of the open galleries will be in the Eastern SOMA/Yerbua Buena area near SF MOMA -- the Yerba Buena neighborhood, if you will. Fourteen art galleries in the hood will open their doors for free art and free refreshments. Contemporary, emerging, and established artists will be featured at these galleries:

ART: It's the first annual Passport, in which the SF Arts Commission invites the public to stroll through one of San Francisco’s neighborhoods to create their own limited edition art book by collecting “passport stamps” made by local artists. This year's featured event is located in the Mission. Tonight is the Kick-Off Party, and the main event is tomorrow from Noon to 4 p.m., with Mission Playground as home base, Valencia between 19th & 20th. (Passports for tomorrow's event are $25 and are available for purchase at various locations. Check the SF Arts Commission Gallery's site for more info.) Tonight's Kick-Off Party will feature live music by The Old Fashioned Way and tunes by DJ Sharbaugh.

ART: Southern Exposure is celebrating their new location Grand Opening and Inaugural Exhibition, Bellwether, "multi-layered speculative projections on our ever shifting and uncertain future." Projects include a time capsule triptych, a large-scale installation of a flood in stasis, an electric camper pod, and more.

ART: Artist Jacqueline Gordon's solo work, Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine, merges contemporary folk aesthetics with the emergent technology of sound imaging, exploring patterns recurrent in nature and collected sounds "synthesized to create inhabitable sculptures that alter one’s physical experience to evoke feelings of intimacy and connectedness or confinement and isolation."

ART: The LightHouse and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery's Art at City Hall program present Insights 2009: 20 Years of Creative Vision, an exhibition of 118 works in a variety of media by 38 blind and visually impaired artists. A free audio tour with voiceovers provided by local celebrities accompanies the show, as well as Braille and large print versions of all Insights materials.

The first previously unknown work by Leonardo Da Vinci to be discovered in a hundred years, a 13-by-10-inch chalk, ink and pencil drawing being called "La Bella Principessa," has been identified via fingerprint evidence. Using forensic technology, a Montreal-based forensic art expert has matched a fingerprint and palm print on the work to that of Leonardo Da Vinci, who apparently left fingerprints on many of his art works. The unsigned drawing had previously been attributed to a 19th Century German artist, until a collector purchased it on suspicion that it looked older than that and that it looked like Da Vinci's work. Experts now believe it is a portrait of the daughter of a 15th Century Milanese duke, and it was basically being used to pimp her out to prospective suitors -- not unlike profile pictures people use today to sell themselves on internet dating sites.

FILM: Check out a night of handmade personal cinema at Luminous Triptych. Angelina Krahn sews onto the surface of the film in order cover up and obscure images of her own body, Karen Johannesen uses masterful editing and single-framing techniques as a study in quantum mechanics, and Rick Bahto’s utilizes in-camera edited works to capture the people and places of his everyday life.

SF ARTS COMMISSION GALLERY: Recipients of the 2009 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts will showcase their recent works in Immediate Future, the SFAC Gallery's biggest event of the year. The exhibition provides Bay Area MFA students with an opportunity to share what they have been developing in their studios with a wider audience. Media represented in the exhibition include drawing, film & video, installation, mixed media, painting, fiber art, performance art and photography. The exhibition runs through December 12.

ART: For their new Echo exhibit, Frey Norris Gallery suggested a painting or sculpture by eight important Surrealists to eight Bay Area artists, asking them to respond or invent a piece around the "resonances between their own interests and the content and ideas in the historical piece," which will be paired together in the gallery. A wide range of objects, including paintings, drawings and mixed media sculptures will be included in the exhibition.

This weekend 's event will be located in the Bernal Heights, Castro, Duboce, Eureka Valley, Glen Park, Mission, Noe Valley, and Portola neighborhoods, and each of the next three weekends will take place in a different geographic location. Download the Weekend 1 map, and hit the pavement Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

ART: It's the bi-monthly Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP), in which 100 artists transform garages, cafes, studios, gardens, street corners, and local businesses into makeshift arts and performance spaces. The event occurs in two parts, The Family MAPP from 1 to 4 p.m., a full afternoon of activities for youths, including mural and sidewalk art, and Evening MAPP from 7 p.m. to Midnight, includes art exhibits, music, poetry, dance and film in multiple locations. Check the schedule for the list of galleries.

THEATER: Foul Play presents The Bride of Frankenstein: Live on Stage as part of their Attack of the Killer B-Movie Series. Performed entirely in black and white, the play will feature the original Franz Waxman score from the 1935 classic, and combines puppetry, shadowplay and myriad other theatricalities of a bygone era.

      

Well, would you look at that. SFist landed an invite to a VIP party at the Contemporary Jewish Museum for a fete honoring Spike Jonze's re-telling of Where the Wild Things Are. Actually, it was also a benefit for 826 Valencia, the Mission district nonprofit that makes people feel good via honing the writing skills of those less fortunate. Or, it's a pirate store. Anyway, last night's festivities, in the end, were all about honoring Hollywood ilk.

ART: It's the opening night of the Open Source Embroidery exhibit at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. The show brings together individual and collectively made artworks by artists, makers, computer programmers and html users that explore the relationship between craft and code through social and digital networks. The exhibit will coincide with the launch of the museum's Etsy Labs, in which local artists will teach visitors how to embroider or brush up on their knitting skills with a quick and easy scarf, free of charge.

In response to some new collages that Matt Gonzalez posted on Facebook, Stephen Robert Lee says "Vibrant and beautiful, Matt. I also loved the analysis of the legal organization and the belief system of morals and or spirituality and the melding of these."

by Amy Crocker

ART: Watch a sweet hot rod race and peruse and bid on hot rod related artwork at the 4th Annual Pinewood Derby & Silent Art Auction, put on by the Hell's Belles Car Club. All proceeds benefit the Bay Area Women's & Children's Center. The race starts at 8 p.m sharp.

FILM: The Expansion Bar may be closed, but it will remain in the hearts of San Franciscans forever, thanks to the documentary, The little man in the Boat. The film consists of footage collected over the last ten years of the bar's existence and includes interviews with Dick Wood, John Anderson, and Gary Milliman.