It's a little too easy to take a Portlandia approach to craft fairs, what with the hipsterrific tendency of local DIYers to put birds on everything and call it a day -- and yes, we guarantee that you will see more than one bird-centric tote today -- but The Fifth Annual Renegade Craft Fair is anything but mock-worthy.
We often think of graffiti artists as shadowy figures who wear hoodies and practice their art on public property like walls, train cars, and traffic signs. It's a culture surrounded by breaking laws for the sake of artistic expression, after all.
If you have ever traveled around this great country of ours, you have almost certainly learned one undeniable truth about the good ol' U.S. of A. -- we're weird.
"Cindy Sherman, who has been working since the mid-'70s, continues to innovate and take risks," said Eva Respini of The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), who organized "Cindy Sherman," the new retrospective of the artist's work at SFMOMA, which opens Saturday. The only West Coast presentation of the show and the first major exhibition of Sherman's work seen in San Francisco, the retrospective includes more than 150 photographs from over 40 years of Sherman's work.
(Jonathan Curiel will be formally reviewing the exhibition for our July 18 issue.)
At our most primal, what do we really need to have a good time? We could probably narrow it down to three: breasts, beer, and barbeque. Before you leave this frat party completely disgusted, this is San Francisco, so of course there's a philanthropy aspect to all the, uh, titillation.
Pure liberation in the arts lies in the affirmation that it doesn't take much to give a wild Pollock of a play a sudden esoteric urgency. Why should we go see go see a one-act musical about a salmon in a casino? It's a metaphor.
If your weekend partying still starts on Fridays (Whatcha doin' tonight, Old Man River? Catching the new How I Met Your Mother?), we'd like to extend the invitation to come out tonight, cling on to your youth, and let loose a little -- doggie style.
Franz Szony has the kinds of dreams usually seen only on screen -- in Hitchcock's Spellbound perhaps, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- with bleeding, anthropomorphic objects and monkeys in tasseled hats.
San Francisco is home base for some of the world's greatest aural explorers. An orchestra comprised of toys or insects, flames that sing arias, organs played by the lapping of the sea, or minuets written by the subtle movement of a composer's limbs are not uncommon here -- but they are remarkable. Every other year, Soundwave brings these distinct and daring artists together for a summer-long fete staged within museums, nightclubs, abandoned bunkers, rolling buses, and open fields.
Remember the time you and your friends sat down to watch the critically acclaimed movie Black Swan and you couldn't help but notice the shocking lack of blood-thirsty ducks? Yeah, we do too. But never fear, because the world's first ballet-horror-comedy, Duck Lake, is here.
