For one month, the Oakland artist Adele Crawford has had the run of the de Young Museum's Kimball Education Gallery. That's a good thing for Crawford and for anyone who wants to participate in making art from old magazines, neglected photos, and the other discarded media that Crawford has brought with her. There's even a decades-old typewriter that visitors use to write words that Crawford then hangs in the air at the de Young's ground-floor gallery. It all makes for a festive atmosphere, which reaches a coda tonight with a reception for the de Young's September Artist-in-Residence. Crawford is known for transforming vintage photos with modern overlays like stitching and bold wording. She calls herself a "reconstructive caretaker" who "manipulate images into new fabricated histories." It's recycling with an artistic twist, though Crawford is also writing directly on the gallery's walls — journal entries that begin with a dream she had of her parents' house, segue into a Cadillac and an old bath tub, and then segue into the ivory trade. You have to read it to believe it. Like Crawford's artwork, the giant handwriting is a pastiche of things that adds up to a bigger whole.
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