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Who is this guy anyway? Based out of San Francisco, CA, Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist creating primarily sculpture and installation based art. You may remember Michael from his SPAM/MAPS project which was part of The Contemporary Museum’s 2006 “Alimatuan: The Emerging Artists as American Filipino” exhibition. SPAM/MAPS by Michael Arcega Michael will be in Honolulu in June as part of the Academy’s summer exhibition “One Way or Another” and a week before our exhibition opens, the Nuuanu Gallery will open an exhibition of his work. He seems to love Hawaii because he’ll be back here later in the year. Michael was invited to work on a project-based residency with The Contemporary Museum’s Catalyst Artist in Residence Program 2009. If you can’t get enough of Michael Arcega, then you’ll definitely have to come hear him speak in a “Conversation with the curator and artists” program to be hosted at the Academy on June 26th. This event is free to the public and we recommend you get your tickets in advance. I’ll keep you updated once the event goes up on the museum website.
I confess: I don’t go to museums as often as I should. I will, of course, make a point to visit big-city museums like London’s Tate Modern, San Francisco’s de Young, and New York’s MoMA when I’m in town. (Did I ever tell you about the time my son, who was then a toddler, gleefully leaped into what he thought was a ball pit but that was actually a 3D installation at MoMA by a really famous Japanese artist whose name now escapes me, and how we were then quickly escorted out of the museum by horrified security guards? Ah, good times … ) I tend to forget about the smaller, less glamorous museums in my own backyard, though — like the Oakland Museum of California, which I believe I’ve only been to once, and that was while chaperoning a second-grade field trip. But there’s a new exhibition arriving at the Oakland Museum on Saturday, May 17, that I’m pretty excited to see, and that will finally snap me out of my hometown-museum slacking. Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury “looks at the painting, architecture, furniture design, decorative and graphic arts, film, and music that launched midcentury modernism in the United States.” The show includes a jazz lounge; film, animation, and television clips; Van Keppel Green furniture and architectural pottery; a period art gallery featuring hard-edged abstract paintings; art, architectural, and documentary photography; and an interactive timeline that highlights California, national, and international culture and history in the 1950s. Featured artists, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, architects, and designers include Lorser Feitelson, Julius Shulman, Miles Davis, Oskar Fischinger, Richard Neutra, and, of course, Charles and Ray Eames. Though Los Angeles what the epicenter of the American Modernism movement, the Oakland Museum has added a dose of contemporary homegrown cool in the form of Cool Remixed. The exhibit examines modern-day “Made in Oaktown” youth culture in the form of graffiti, DJs, themed lounges, street fashion, scraper bikes, skateboarding videos, a quarter-bowl skate ramp, impromptu hip-hop performances, and T.U.R.F. dancing, as well as art rendered on car hoods, hubcaps, and sneakers. (Random Oakland claim to fame: Both “hella” — hence my “I Hella Love Oakland” series — and “hyphy” sprang from O-Town’s dense primordial soup before entering the American lexicon.) Birth of the Cool and Cool Remixed will be at the Oakland Museum, 1000 Oak St. at Tenth, through August 17. Museum admission is $8 for adults (although it’s free on the second Sunday of each month). Catch them while you can!
Check out these great links regarding Marijuana, Hemp, and the liberalization and legalization of both. MedicalMarijuanaPatient US Hemp Co US Hemp Museum Hemp is coming back in a strong way and these websites help promote awareness, responsibility, and benefit to everyone from all parts of the cannabis plant. So check em out…
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05/15/2008 
