I’ll acknowledge that I was a little behind in getting over to the newly revamped Oakland Museum of California (and even more delayed in publishing about it), but the large airy concrete space is well worth a walk through. The Oak Street museum houses the largest collection of California art worldwide in a new state-specific gallery. And while it includes everything you’d expect–Hollywood memorabilia, mock internment camp housing–the museum’s gallery of California history also has jaw-dropping images of the 1906 earthquake and unbelievably offensive depictions of workers in SF’s Chinatown at the turn of the century. I’d bring a guest–the conversation will take you far beyond the massive potted herbs that lead you out of the museum.
And through the 26th, San Francisco painter and animator Rebecca Whipple will be showing her work in a solo show at Oakland’s Hatch Gallery. Not that you’ll need encouragement once you see her fantastical work, but scholar Mark Bartlett, described it this way at a recent Tate Modern Lecture: “Rather than using visual strategies to erase indexical realism, Rebecca Whipple’s paintings preserve it only to subvert it in the aesthetic conflicts between illustration, craft, pop culture, war, animation, and cartoons.” Yes please.
[...] a sucker for vintage photography (as evidenced by the amount of time it took me to get through the Oakland Museum’s state exhibit), so getting turned onto Calisphere made for a less-than-productive but quite wonderful flight home [...]