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Press Releases
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Oakland, California, July 10, 2012 — The City of Oakland’s wildly successful flagship festival, Art & Soul Oakland, ventures into its 12th year by adding a late-night bash and cutting-edge art show to its long established reputation as one of the region’s top music festivals. Complementing this musical cornucopia of rock, R&B, jazz, soul, folk, E.D.M., punk, honky-tonk, metal, blues, gospel, world and Latin are large-scale art installations from some of the Bay Area’s hottest local artists. Named among the top 12 “must-see summer festivals” in Northern California by the San Francisco Chronicle, Art & Soul Oakland 2012 -- slated for August 4 & 5 in downtown Oakland -- goes boldly into the night on Saturday, with audio-video art installations and multimedia performances to accompany DJ Dyloot broadcasting from the rooftop of Oakland City Hall.
Thanks to an expanded partnership with the East Bay Express, the festival will include many new art elements ranging from large-scale installations created for the festival to swirling light projections. Collaborations with world-class arts organizations such as the de Young Artist Fellow and Artist-in-Residence Alumni, Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, Black Rock Arts Foundation, The Crucible, NIMBY, Pro Arts and American Steel Studios will result in unparalleled quantities of art throughout the 12th Annual Art & Soul Festival.
Saturday’s late night bash will feature, in audio-synchronicity with DJ Dyloot who will be spinning from the rooftop of City Hall, 3-D video projections on City Hall and other buildings around Frank Ogawa Plaza by the students and faculty from the Ex’pression College for Digital Arts’ Motion Graphic Design Program. Simultaneously, the Illuminated Corridor’s light-based art projections led by Oakland artist Suki O’Kane will pierce the darkness with their renowned gorilla-style artistry.
Thirty-five original East Bay Express “art racks,” created by some of the region’s best street artists and masters of the spray can, will premiere at Art & Soul. This collection of outdoor newspaper boxes converted into functional art pieces has been curated by Oakland-based artist Eddie Colla and will be on display in the walkway between Frank H. Ogawa Plaza and City Center. The art racks will be on display both Saturday and Sunday.
At the nearby Pro Arts Gallery, a unique digital gallery of artwork by Oakland artists celebrates Oakland’s ranking as having the most artists per capita in the country, outside of Greenwich Village. Their gallery exhibiting the “What we can't see but want is art” Bay Area Currents 2012 show will be open both Saturday and Sunday. Another projection installation, 200 Yards @ Oakland City Hall, is a collaborative community digital project with Lightbox SF that features images capturing the unique neighborhood character found within a 200-yard radius of the oak tree in Frank Ogawa Plaza.
lOAKal, Oakland’s newest pop-up shop at 14th Street and Broadway, is a mixed-use gallery curated by Ken Harman of Spoke Art. For Art & Soul, the gallery will host a group show of an intriguing cross section of painting, sculpture and illustration. Many of the pieces created by internationally renowned Oakland artists have never been exhibited previously.
Moving inside historic City Hall, the Oakland Underground Film Festival OAKUFF will screen, on Saturday night, a collection of new and renowned feature films by local filmmakers in the third floor Council Chambers during Art & Soul. OAKUFF will also present music videos, short fiction and documentary works that speak directly to the culture and character of Oakland along with a sneak peek of September’s upcoming OAKUFF 2012 events and programs.
As festival goers walk to and from the Council Chambers, they will be captivated by several large-scale art installations, including several making exhibitory debuts. City Hall will be open both Saturday and Sunday.
Just outside of the Council Chambers on the third floor will be six installations. John W. Wood’s engaging, sensual works on paper with successive layers of graphite, crayon, oil pastel and pigment stick will frame the entry doors to Council Chambers. Taro Hattori’s final iteration of PENETRATION is a large-scale three-dimensional sculpture crafted from hand-cut cardboard. The original missile installation was disassembled “destroyed” to suggest something had happened to the vessel as it ended its journey, allowing the viewer to see the exhausted body of the missile. The course of the journey is represented by the accompanying photographs LOT 51 and RANCHO SECO PARK. Oakland-based Namita Kapoor will be exhibiting new artwork created specifically for Art & Soul that draws from her dual heritage as both a South Asian and an American. Her multi-media work is a hybrid of Western media, craft, ornament and symbolism. Another art piece making its debut at Art & Soul will be a large-scale digital drawing with paper cutouts by Mayumi Hamanaka, an Oakland-based artist. Her work revolves around the idea of how history, personal stories, individualism and group dynamics are all tangled within a society. She examines her own perspective and experience in the context of how history is written and how we decode it in our current surroundings.
Two de Young Artist Fellow and Artist-in-Residence Alumni artists, Ramekon O’Arwisters and Todd T. Brown, will also have installations on the third floor – bringing additional creativity and color to the beaux arts architecture of historic City Hall. Sated Above the Salt, a sculptural installation by Ramekon O’Arwisters, resurrects traditional African shamanistic aesthetic while remaining unquestionably contemporary. He meticulously attaches found objects, mirrors, feathers and nails to everyday objects, imbuing them with spiritual power and significance. The everyday object that serves as a base for his piece on display is a chair placed on four, salt-filled goblets. Todd T. Brown will use his 20 years of experience exploring artistic disciplines and presenting small-scale arts within the context of local and global communities to create a new mixed-media art piece for Art & Soul. Brown is a founder of the Red Poppy Art House and the Mission Arts & Performance Project as well as being an artistic advisor for the EDELO contemporary art center in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
On the grand stairway’s central landing, Oakland’s own Masako Miyazaki presents The Knot as an open symbol suggesting both the societal ideal of diverse entities united for a common purpose and an entangled structure produced by the processes of complicated relationships and compromised situations. Masako’s piece, exhibited for the first time publicly, represents knottings and unknottings as a natural series of changes resultant from the negotiations of different ideas brought to City Hall.
On the ground floor of City Hall, Oakland-based American Steel Studios artist Jane Elliot will create a whimsical diorama to debut at Art & Soul. Her work characterizes her inventive proliferation of the natural world and penchant for industrial design. It is an endless combination of beast-like spare parts all mixed up with mechanized flora and fauna blended in a caricature of shining colors and black lines. Nearby, Tracey Snelling – an internationally renowned, Oakland-based artist – brings her multi-media works to Art & Soul. Through the use of sculpture, photography, video and installation, Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience, and allows the viewer to extrapolate his or her own meaning. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life as it plays out, sometimes creating a sense of mystery, other times stressing the mundane.
Another exciting collaboration this year will bring large-scale, Burning Man-style sculptures from artists associated with the Black Rock Foundation and Oakland’s own NIMBY. Many of these towering pieces have been crafted by Oakland artists who spend months preparing for the week-long event on the playa. The Crucible, the Oakland based non-profit educational facility that fosters a collaboration of Arts, Industry and Community, will demonstrate some of the fine and industrial arts that have made it a regional treasure.
Advance tickets are now available online at www.artandsouloakland.com. Festival goers can save money by buying tickets in advance online. As always, children 12 and under enjoy free admission to the festival. Online admission prices are $10 for Adults and $5 for Seniors 65+ and Youth 13-17. The easy-to-use system allows purchasers to print their tickets at home and walk directly to one of the festival’s three entrances, bypassing ticket purchase lines.
A family paradise, Art & Soul Oakland boasts the largest Family Fun Zone of any festival in the Bay Area, complete with kid-friendly rides and carnival games, inflatable bounce houses and interactive arts.
Art & Soul Oakland 2012 takes place in downtown Oakland on Saturday, August 4, 2012, from 2:00 p.m. to midnight, and on Sunday, August 5, 2012, from noon to 6:00 p.m. The festival is centered in Frank Ogawa Plaza and City Center, encompassing ten strollable city blocks. Northern California’s most accessible festival, Art & Soul Oakland offers direct service from BART 12th Street - Oakland City Center Station in addition to free parking for cars and free bike valet parking.
Art & Soul Oakland 2012 is produced by the City of Oakland in association with the East Bay Express. Major sponsors include Budweiser, Lucky, KFOG 104.5/97.7 FM, The New R&B 102.9 FM KBLX., Clear Channel Outdoor, Oakland Magazine, Downtown Oakland Association, Lake Merritt-Uptown Association and Oakland City Center.
For more information on Art & Soul Oakland 2012, visit www.ArtandSoulOakland.com or call 510 444-CITY.
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Media Contacts:
Harry Hamilton, Associate Producer/Publicity, 510 238-2107 or hhamilton@oaklandnet.com
Samee Roberts, Executive Producer, 510 238-2136 or sroberts@oaklandnet.com
Michael Coats, Coats PR, 707 935-6203 or michael@coatspr.com
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