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 selecting 877...

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 dramatize, although...

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 who will make...