Oakland Photo Workshop’s 5th Anniversary Celebration The DeYoung Museum’s triennial “Open” is a target for thousands of Bay Area artists, and because of its process, the 2023 edition featured 137 photographers, as of this writing still shown on the exhibit’s website. We’re of course interested in how many were included in the 2020 Open – during the COVID Era: the exhibition overall received 11,514 submissions from 6,200 applicants in a two-week period in June 2020, eventually

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2026 Spoiler Alert. In another fine mix of painting, photography and a splash of 3D work, curator Jan Watten at Gray Loft Gallery wraps a summer show about water with a deceptively simple title, Surface Tension. Naturally this throws us back to a few things: insects that magically skate on a lake; the mystery of what holds bubbles together, and our faces breaking into the air from our strokes under the deep end of a pool. These appreciations all dr

Economic support of the Arts continues to be under-prioritized, inadequate, and aspirational in an environment of fierce competition with political trends and sufficient provision of human services. The issue is not, however, that the Arts are deemed weak or unimportant to decision-making in those areas. The real issue is that, without a track record of impacts that clearly enhance those two areas in a predictably consistent way, the Arts are seen as optional except for those

March 2026 The storefront entrance to The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square features a display space having a character somewhat like an amphitheater. And in the current exhibit held by it, the effect is especially apropos as its featured works restage the early 1960’s East Bay of the critical protest period of the Free Speech Movement and more. At The Grand Gallery These are classic black-and-white photographs laid out in three sections. The left section powerful

Six Takeaways from a Sextet Gray Loft Gallery stands out usually due to the artistry of its top-tier show layouts One navigates a Gray Loft show multiple times because of the many conversations owner Jan Watten creates among the works on display. But for those who move quickly this week (Saturday 11/8 ) , the gallery features an important departure: a show both chosen and hung by the six participating artists themselves. This is a group of women who have been working togethe

Pete’s Story Say the name “Escovedo” in Oakland, and right away there’s a chance that music starts playing in your head. It features beats that ruled before hip hop, and when it first came to Oakland it lived as well outdoors as in a club or on the road. Between today and its arrival in the 1920s and 30s, evolving from the confluence of Black and Mexican musicians, Latin Jazz gained and held prominence in its own social milieu and in the larger public sphere. But one of its m

The Gray Loft Annual Color Show, 2025 Some colors pop, some shout. Purple? Purple wells up. Perhaps quickly like a stain, or slowly like a bloom pushing its way through to the front of the line. But quietly. Or, it’s already there in plain sight, but like high heat on a kettle’s skin. If it touches you, it makes an impression fierce enough to make just the memory of it almost as strong as touching it again. Or, sometimes purple is smothering, wrapping your mind like velvet. I

At Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland What’s In A Name? The title of this show, Beyond the Frame, immediately gets us asking questions. Is the frame physical, or metaphorical? Actual or virtual? Is the idea about what is new, outside of the familiar? Or what is presented outside of what is conventionally allowed? A Celebration of Large-Scale Art, the subtitle for the show, then helps out: size matters . Now we know that what we’re looking for is an experience that size creates, whic

Photographer Steve Molnar knows quite a bit about places that most people wouldn't call their usual habitat. But through his pictures, having seen what he shows, we carry away a sense of being captured by the places just as he was. Molnar is known for work that is journalistic, following his instincts and concerns for people who live in some remote places without much attention except from each other. But this go around, his sixth at San Francisco’s 60SIX , he offers a medita

By any reasonable measures, Bill Weber is one of the Bay Area’s most established artists, celebrated repeatedly over many years and phases of work. His astonishing family history, spanning Germany, Missouri, and California, parks the listener in locales as diverse as Hearst Castle and Brentwood; and it weaves among people with names like Peralta, Dali, and Benny Goodman. At the drop of a hat, he’s opening one of many albums of memorabilia, unreeling the story. Most well-known

Judson King Smith at Transmission Gallery August 1 through September 14 I got to Judson King Smith’s current show the day before his planned public reception. Transmission Gallery’s handout flyer accompanying the exhibit had to substitute for the artist not being there with me, but it went like a guided missile to the thing that should aid me the most: Smith’s central idea. Slightly reworded: all that we know about ourselves occupies just a moment in the passing of time.

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2024 (Note: see the terrific thumbnail gallery of artworks in this show at grayloftgallery.com while reading this review…) A real tree person doesn’t just see trees; and not even “the tree ”… For a real tree person, it’s always my tree. But when I show someone else my tree, there’s always a chance that they just aren’t going to “get it”. What’s worse, the one thing all of us tree people begrudgingly know is that trees can do without us, yet we ca

Jamie Treacy at Gearbox Gallery April - May 2024 Gearbox Gallery stands street level in a West Oakland building two stories tall. It has enough space to accommodate the group of artists who form and run it, such that all artists have always at least one work on display. In this scheme, it makes a one-person show on the lower floor as special to the members as it may be to us. The current featured work is testimony to how the gallery, as an organization, highly motivates indiv

Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland March - April 2024 In a part of the U.S. where diversity is one of the most prominent social features, the East Bay in California increasingly feels more like the real destination of the Bay Bridge than just one of its two anchors. But historical arrivals of peoples of African descent need not have had any earlier stop in San Francisco before arriving in Oakland or its contiguous neighbors. There are many ways in, and the land mass taken up for habi

Scientists are fond of surprising children with the news that nothing in reality is colored, but instead has color when excited by light. This makes every crayon a small magic wand, applying a liquid prism on whatever they touch. Three Lost Years photo by YelenaZhavoronkova But perhaps our first experience of pink comes from something we can’t reach – the sky. One of the signature images in Pretty in Pink at the Gray Loft Gallery reminds us that the sky is where we learn pin

TRACING PASSAGES Until November 11th, Oakland’s Gray Loft Gallery boasts a genre -bending trio of artists whose works erase the presumed difference between the abstract and the concrete. In very differing ways, Ruth Boerefyn, Tom White, and Cuong Ta take strongly visceral materials and work them into forms of imagery that also readily float back and forth from echoing nature to insisting on the artifice of their own invention. One of the hallmarks of shows at Gray Loft is the

Oakland, CA April 1 through May 6, 2023 The word “portrait” can apply to many different things, such as a place, a time, a culture, or a person; the current show at Gray Loft Gallery is dedicated to people. Portraits always seem like declarative statements. But the portrait always stages a dialogue, featuring the question “What am I like, and what is like me?” Portraiture insists that the viewer considers how he, she, or they compare to the subject. As direct exploration o

Wired up with Diane Komater Feb-Mar 2023 By Malcolm Ryder Are we over-exposed? Not in the highly sex-positive Bay Area of California, where erotica is not even taboo anymore. But the notion of erotica can still have a special influence, either if it presumes to identify something even more exclusive than before, or because some audiences still haven’t really bought into x-rated material being “business as usual”. Either way, the more erotica that is easily available, the mo

February 2023, Oakland Curator: Jan Watten Diaspora is a vivid word. We sense it in two ways. Saying it feels like saying “disperse.” At the same time, our ordinary response to hearing it is in the mind’s eye; we see it – the scattering of one thing into many. Then, there’s the matter of where things scattered to, and what we see when we find them. We’ll find meanings in that, but we also imaginatively make meaning of it. It’s like looking at constellations, taking a snaps

Arriving After turning twice up the narrow stairway, a type exactly halfway between rustic and industrial chic, one enters the Gray Loft gallery on Oakland's Ford Street, a space rewardingly larger than it first appears to be. The first thing that registers is the excellent wall-by-wall grouping of the types of images – so successful in that task that it almost seems the photographs were made-to-order for the show. It is the 10th Anniversary celebration show for the gallery,