Instagram-ready festival wear has become its own species of personal expression. The styles at Reggae on the River are certainly qualify, whether on performers, fans or the vendors, workers and volunteers who make the show possible, including volunteer security personnel, medics, food truck operators, cooks, camera people, sound technicians and journalists. Oven-like August temperatures presented a […]
Gabrielle Gopinath
Gabrielle Gopinath is a critic who writes about art, place and culture in Northern California. She lives in Arcata. Follow her on Instagram @gabriellegopinath.
Posted inArts + Scene
Seeds and Surfing
This past Sunday festivalgoers at Reggae on the River reveled in good vibes, positive sounds and gorgeous summer weather. Any storm clouds that might be gathering in Babylon were far from the collective consciousness of this happy crowd. Coot Wyman, the affable frontman of the Chico reggae fusion band Mystic Roots, exhorted us to smile […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Faraway Nearby
Old Town Eureka twanged with the shock of the new last week when street artist Dan Kitchener unveiled an enormous new mural in its midst, the first to grace the city in several years. “Electric-City” is executed entirely in freehand spray paint on the east side of the Buhne Building at the corner of G […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Rediscovering Phillips House
Arcata’s Phillips House is the oldest building standing in Arcata and it has lasted longer than is likely for any structure in a culture that prioritizes change. Built between 1850 and 1855, it stands today as both outlier and relic, having outlived all of its local contemporaries. It was placed on the National Register of […]
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From Kiln Shed to Skate Park
One person throws a pot, one rides a board. Yet the subcultures that have grown up around ceramics and skateboarding center around membership in a group or tribe. This month’s Arts Alive! provides two opportunities to contemplate this dynamic. Piante Gallery features work by ceramicist Conrad Calimpong, who has been firing pots in his self-built […]
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Sculpture Garden Variety
Viewing Subjective Realities at the Sanctuary Arcata feels like passing through a wind tunnel time machine. All major 20th-century sculptural tropes come at you at once, revenants with their wires crossed and their channels remixed. Erin Flyer’s neo-primitivist wood relief recalls the shapes Gauguin carved above his hut in the Marquesas; it sits across from […]
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Open Season
When you visit a studio or a shared exhibition space, you’re often able to interact directly with the artist. The resultant possibilities abound. You might meet an established artist you’ve admired or meet an emerging talent. You could get dibs on new pieces before they appear in local galleries or see the workspace where the […]
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Time (and) Travel
It’s May and the Blue Lake Museum just reopened for the season — two good reasons to head inland, toward the sun. A copywriter working for the now-defunct Hotel Korbel, close to downtown Blue Lake, puffed the excursion in the 1920s: “Ho! For Korbel in the land of sunshine, fruit and flowers. While in Humboldt, […]
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Details from Big Collision
Whether or not you’ve spent much time thinking about the wizardly effects that can be achieved with pen and ink, you should catch Kaye Buchman: Around the Whirled at the Morris Graves Museum of Art’s Anderson Gallery this Arts Alive before it closes on May 7. Buchman’s large-scale pen and ink works are something to […]
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First Contact: Steven Paul Judd’s Moving Pictures
When Kiowa-Choctaw artist Steven Paul Judd was a child, growing up on Indian reservations in Oklahoma and Mississippi, he contracted polio and had to go to the hospital. There, by his own account, he “saw TV for the first time.” It made a big impression. As luck would have it, the TV movie that was […]
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Points of Egress
Not long ago, I found myself in the recently renamed California Redwood Coast Humboldt County Airport, looking at art. Perhaps you haven’t given much thought to the airport as arts venue — me neither, until my delayed luggage turned into an occasion to contemplate works of art on display as part of the Redwood Art […]