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

The demand for creativity as a staple of business operations has never been more broadly intense. So we assume that it is somehow in supply and in practice more than ever as well. Yet when we survey (e.g. as on LinkedIn) the ability to describe what it is, and therefore to know how to make it happen or find it, the common definition is as stubbornly elusive as the demand for it is intense. The unresolved debate of "creativity" as a "problem" to solve is a performative ambigui

Why does someone make art, and why do they make it the way they do? Even though we want the answers, that question is too big and...

Nine Notes on how Kehinde Wiley makes Black Lives Matter 1. More is More August, 2023 – As of this writing, there is plenty of time left for the de Young Museum’s general audience to make it to the Kehinde Wiley show, An Archaeology of Silence . Much of that audience will be attracted to the show by the celebrity Wiley earned through being the selected artist for the official Presidential portrait of megastar Barack Obama. But that very large painting, with its curious leafy

Today, many people all over the world practice the ancient Japanese art of suiseki. This involves appreciating the natural shape of a rock or stone . Practitioners search for, collect, and present stones that evoke other natural forms. -- gemsociety.org Ingenuity means the quality of being clever, original, and inventive . -- Encyclopedia Britannica, britannica.com Soul : emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic

Because you’re reading this, I’m going to give myself the liberty of presuming that you have seen AND read the Forbes article, “AI-Created Images Aren’t Protected By Copyright Law According To U.S. Copyright Office” and perhaps noticed the following. “But the drawings, which were all created by Midjourney…” “the images in the Work […] are not the product of human authorship” “animals have taken photos…” “A person who provides text prompts to Midjourney does not ‘actually for

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it. -- Yogi Berra May 18 - Reading through today's news about the Supreme Court ruling on Andy...

Composing spans all media and genres in which a whole is built by arranging selected parts. So, naturally, it can produce things from...

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

As relayed to me by a colleague, there was a guest essay in the Opinion section of the New York Times , March 8, 2023, by Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull. (As noted by the Times "Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are professors of linguistics. Dr. Watumull is a director of artificial intelligence at a science and technology company.") Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT (The link is to a "gift" copy of the article which should be accessible to those who do

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

Results, Automagically We can be surprised only so much to find out that encyclopedias of everything seem now to be available. Our common experience of using web search engines easily lands us on subjects and facts that we neither already knew about ourselves nor were going to create. Even further, discovering the extent of information already developed about some new-to-us topic is usually somewhere between humbling and intimidating. We may not know any of the people involv

Project overview Critiquing a specific legacy archetype of maleness, the Not Male Show extends beyond feminism to a more inclusive representation of self-determining identities that are alternative to that archetype. It will simultaneously exhibit an overall group contrast to that legacy and argue against the ambiguous generalization of catch-all categorizations (such as "LGBTQ"), through art works concretely expressing interpretations and experiences that distinguish these r

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,

Artificial Intelligence , or A.I., rages on in the world of visual art, it’s current ability to automatically compose being the new apex of its functionality. While A.I. continues to make progress at cognition , its most exciting influence on image making has now moved to showing what it “knows” about methods used to combine parts into arrangements that make a whole, that is, composition . It presents a challenge to human image-makers who have placed high value on their own

Ghost Busters The experience of time’s passage takes place only due to the perception of change, and if the noticeable events don’t happen on their own then cultures have more than compensated by creating commemoration and rituals of marking time. The most important of the commemorations are ritualized to ensure they are distinct from ordinal and ordinary experiences, but moreso that they keep bringing the past back to the present. In the age of being green, mausoleums are an