Mark Your Calendar: Your Weekend of Art, Shopping, and Valentine's Day Preparations

Bay Area locals: Get your arting pants on and don your best shopping shoes for a weekend of fun art- and design-related happenings.

Friday night, February 6, is, of course, the Oakland Art Murmur. Among the highlights this month:

Emily Wick (whose popular State Mottos prints were featured here recently) and her boyfriend, artist Brian Brooks, are opening a new gallery in the Temescal District called Smokey's Tangle (named after the couple's imaginary cat). Stop by Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. for the grand-opening reception and show featuring work from Wick, Brooks, and others. Smokey's Tangle is located at 4709 Telegraph Ave.

Lena Reynoso brings her Forty Four Presidents portraits to Blankspace Gallery. The show explores "the visual impact of our corpus of Presidents ... and the presentation and representation of our Nation’s past and our future." Blankspace is located at 6608 San Pablo Ave.

Creative Growth Gallery, which supports artists with disabilities, hosts a group show from longtime program artists Kerri Damianakes, John Martin, Ron Veasey, and George Wilson. Creative Growth is located at 355 24th St.

Fort Gallery, which has taken over the cavernous space recently vacated by Esteban Sabar, will hold an opening reception from 6 to 10 p.m. for Future Winter, a group show from Christopher Murdoch, Emily Goldstein, Miko Isla, and others. Fort is located at 480 23rd St.

Front Gallery hosts a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. for the group show Aftersight, featuring artitsts Francesca Pera, Rocky Angel, and Carolyn Haydu. Aftersight "examines the effect of extraordinary personal events and how they ... are never fully put aside but but always linger just under the surface of our everyday lives." Front Gallery is located at 35 Grand Ave.

At Old Oakland's FiveTen Studio, mother-and-daughter artists Rosa De Anda and Lila Maes De Anda unveil their joint show, The Challenge. The cross-generational collaboration features Ollin, "large-scale wings reborn from recycled lath discarded from San Francisco Victorian homes," and Shattered Not Broken, "small-scale hearts made from recycled glass found in dark alleys and bus shelters, on the side of church steeples, and under worn-out stools in bars. The selected pieces are about the spiritual journey and individual responsibility in healing one's heart." FiveTen Studio is located at 831 Broadway.

If you're across the Bay on Saturday, February 7, check out GetLocalSF's We Heart the Mission Midwinter Stroll from noon until night. Hip shops such as BellJar (where everything will be 10 percent off), the Curiosity Shoppe (also offering 10 percent off almost everything), Candystore, Paxton Gate, and Rare Device (which will be offering 20 percent off) will host special sales and other in-store events during the Stroll. Find a map of participating merchants here.

One special event not to miss in the Mission Saturday afternoon: Lea Redmond's World's Smallest Postal Service. Redmond will set up her lilliputian mobile office at the Curiosity Shoppe from 2 to 5 p.m. and turn out the sweetest, smallest Valentine's love letters imaginable for $8 apiece. (Not in the area? Never fear -- you can order a tiny letter or card online.)

Also on hand at the Shoppe will be PodPost's Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan, who will have an array of Valentine's Day and mail-friendly goodies for sale. The Curiosity Shoppe is located at 855 Valencia St.

Have fun out there, kids.

Mark Your Calendar: Art Openings and Holiday Sales

Lots of opportunities around the Bay this weekend to find unique holiday gifts, affordable original art, and other fresh pieces for your home:

For the next three weekends, San Francisco decorative painter Daniel Gundlach hosts his annual Language of Cloth Textile Bazaar. The trunk show and sale features fine handmade textiles from Southeast Asia (such as the gorgeous piece above), all at wholesale prices. Language of Cloth is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through December 21 at 650-B Guerrero St. in the Mission District.

Over here on the sunny side of the Bay, super newsstand/art gallery Issues, at 20 Glen Ave. just off Oakland's Piedmont Avenue, hosts an opening reception this evening from 5 to 9 p.m. for artist Olivia Allums's Oakland Signage show. The exhibit features 30 small paintings of some of the city's more modest, but no less iconic, landmarks. Oakland Signage will be up at Issues through the end of the month.

Staring tonight at 6 p.m., neighboring Oakland art galleries Blankspace and The Compound Gallery join forces for the third annual Holidayland Gift Sale. More than 50 local artists will be selling original artwork, handmade crafts, accessories, papergoods, holiday ornaments, tote bags, jewelery, and more. (I just looked over the list of participants, and it's not the same dozen or so artists and crafters who -- fabulous as they are -- seem to rent booths at every other Bay Area art fair and craft event, so I'm excited to see some fresh new goodies at this shindig.) There will also be music, food, and seasonal libations.

If you don't make it this evening, the galleries will host another reception next Sunday, December 14, from 4 to 7 p.m. You can also visit the Holidayland Sale during regular gallery hours, noon to 7 p.m. Saturdays through Mondays until December 15. Blankspace is located at 6608 San Pablo Ave., and The Compound at 6602-6604 San Pablo Ave., both in North Oakland.

Also tonight from 5:30 to 8 p.m., Uptown Oakland's Creative Growth Art Center will hold its Holiday 2008 Studio Sale, featuring original art, prints, and artisan-produced ceramics, wood sculpture, rugs, glassware, bags, and T-shirts. A portion of every purchase helps support Creative Growth's program for artists with disabilities. If you miss the opening party, you can still shop the sale from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays December 6, 13, and 20. Creative Growth is located at 355 24th St.

Nearby, Uptown's Rock Paper Scissors Collective hosts an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. this evening for its group show Second Coming, featuring "ingenious reincarnations of discarded items into truly unique and inspired artwork." Also available will be 100 percent recycled gifts handmade through RPSC's Community Collaborations Project, in which local artist Chelsea Fadda worked with low-income and homeless adults at St. Vincent De Paul's found arts studio. The exhibit as well as the recycled gifts will be on display at RPSC through December 27. The shop and gallery is located at 2278 Telegraph Ave.

The ceramic artists at Berkeley's Fourth & Clay Studios -- Rae Dunn, Christa Assad, and Josie Jurczenia -- open their doors for Holiday Sales the next three weekends in December (that is, December 6 and 7, 13 and 14, and 20 and 21). On offer from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday are wares from the in-house ceramists as well as textiles, papergoods, jewelry, art, and pottery from a rotating cast of their distinguished friends, including Diana Fayt, Whitney Smith, Susannah Schnick, Aliza Cohen, Linea Carta, and others. The studio is located at 2390 C Fourth St. near Clay in West Berkeley.

Speaking of Whitney Smith and Diana Fayt, they're having studio sales of their own this weekend. Smith's Holiday Studio Sale takes place 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. December 6 and 7 in her workspace at 539 Athol Ave. in Oakland. In addition to bargain-priced seconds, Smith will be selling first-quality items and several new designs.

Over in San Francisco, Fayt's Holiday Sale, which runs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, December 6, will feature her gorgeous new red-and-black designs, plus lots of affordable wares for those feeling the economic pinch. Fayt's studio is located at 1044 Revere Ave., Unit 5-29 in the Bayview district.

From 6 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, online gallery Red Cake celebrates its first birthday with a live event called Shiny Brite, featuring work from Daniel Ross and Lissa Ivy Tiegel. The art will also be on display Sunday, December 7, and Saturday, December 13, by appointment at 4209 Howe St. in Oakland.

Back in San Francisco on Sunday, don't miss the annual Rhode Island School of Design Holiday Sale at Fort Mason. More than 30 RISD grads will be selling jewelry, home accents, glass, prints, paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture, papergoods, and textiles. The sale runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. December 7 in Fort Mason Building A, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street.

Whew!

Mark Your Calendar: Oakland Art Murmur's "First Friday"

Don't miss the Oakland Art Murmur on Friday, June 1.

On the first Friday evening of each month, galleries and artists' collectives in and near Oakland's newly bustling (but still edgy) Uptown area open from 7 to 10 p.m. for the coalition's monthly art walk. Participants include Rock Paper Scissors, Blankspace, Boontling Gallery, Rowan Morrison, 21 Grand, Creative Growth, Mercury 20, and Front Gallery, among others.

Affordable art is a key part of the mix: Original pieces by emerging artists can be had for as little as $20, while work from more established painters, illustrators, photographers, and sculptors runs several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Oakland has long been an artists' haven, but in recent years the art scene has exploded as high costs have pushed droves of working artists out of San Francisco in search of more affordable studio space. I liken it a bit to the arts pilgrimage from Manhattan to Brooklyn during the last ten years. (Indeed, Oakland is reputedly second only to New York in number of artists per capita.) The Oakland Art Murmur was born last year to showcase this growing local arts community.

So grab a coffee, a beer, or a bite to eat at Mama Buzz Cafe and then stroll from art space to art space. Among the artists exhibiting this month are Chris Truman, Carl Auge, Alexander Cheves, James Gouldthorpe, and Moira Murdock. Don't miss 21 Grand's "Small Works" fundraising sale, which features works from dozens of local artists, all priced at $100 or less. Bring a lawn chair or a blanket, too, and settle in for Asphalt Shorts IV, a series of short films about cities and urbanism that's being screened in the Broadway parking lot between 21st and 22nd streets at 8:30.


You're also likely to catch a drum circle, a bonfire, a guerrilla art performance, or a busking band amidst the milling students, hipsters, and art aficionados on the street. It's a happening Happening indeed.

Info, directions, and details here.

(Photos by Lane Hartwell for Oakland magazine.)