Join us for “The Hero Within Us” A joint event at Rock Paper Scissors Collective, 21 Grand and Creative Growth Art Center in honor of Art IS Education, a countywide celebration of youth arts learning.

Rock Paper Scissors Collective
2278 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA 94612
“The Hero Within Us: A Night for Heroes” 6-9 pm, March 5th

• Find your inner super hero at RPSC by investigating what special abilities you bring your community.
• Compose poetry signs to take on the Illuminated Art Walk.
• Add to a wall of hero actions in our community.
• Make yourself a hero cape after taking action on behalf of the arts.

21 Grand
416 – 25th Street, Oakland, CA 94612-2409
The Hero Within Us: Subtitle TBA” 7-10 pm

• View the Super Heroes exhibit by Art Esteem artists.
• Meet the youth artists and hear what inspired their work.
• Experience student performances and video screenings by youth groups including Opera Piccola’s Art Gate Players, OakTechRep, and other youth groups.

Creative Growth Art Center
355 – 24th Street, Oakland, CA 94612
The Hero Within Us: Postcards to Heroes”  6-9 pm

• View postcard art that Creative Growth artists have made for their personal heroes.
• Join the action and make a postcard to your own personal hero!
• Listen to the band Woom perform on their ingenious instruments made out of everyday and recycled objects.
• Play along with the band!

Illuminated Art Walk
Every hour a guide riding a bicycle projecting art images will lead an illuminated art walk from venue to venue.  The route will go from Rock Paper Scissors Collective to Creative Growth Art Center to 21 Grand and back to Rock Paper Scissors Collective.  Gallery goers are encouraged to bring their poetry signs and capes from Rock Paper Scissors Collective on the walk.  The Illuminated Art Walk is a project of The Illuminated Corridor.

http://www.artiseducation.org/10/

2^nd Annual Fun-A-Day In the Bay
Artclash Collective West
Rock Paper Scissors Collective
Feb. 5th, 2010
6pm-9pm
www.artclash.comrpscollective.com

Friday, February 5th: Rock Paper Scissors hosts the Artclash Collective’s second annual Fun-A-Day in the Bay. Organized by a group of Philly ex-pats, Fun-A-Day in the Bay builds on Artclash’s annual tradition (6 years strong) of organizing Fun-A-Day shows in Philadelphia.

Fun-A-Day is a simple concept that produces beautiful results.  Participants choose a project and produce one piece of artwork every day for the entire month of January. The 31 resulting pieces create a narrative outlining each artist’s journey through the first month of the year. Projects vary from lighthearted to serious, high-brow to low-brow.  This year’s list of mediums includes photos, drawings, paintings, dances, songs, textiles and more!

The desire to create is a fundamental expression of humanity that we are often alienated from or fearful of. Fun-A-Day seeks to remove the barriers to creativity by offering opportunities and invitations for participation. We believe everyone is an artist and everything you make is art; we seek to create a welcoming forum for people to share what they do, to strengthen existing communities of artists, and to kick-start new ones.

The Fun-A-Day show will be held at Rock Paper Scissors, 2278 Telegraph Ave in Oakland. RPS is “is a volunteer-run organization that fosters creativity and collaboration in order to strengthen local communities and encourage sustainable practices and alternative models”.  Visit rpscollective.com for more information about the gallery. The Fun-A-Day show will be up in the gallery for the entire month of February. The show is free and all-ages and will feature performances on opening night.  Come out and see what your friends (and future friends) have been up to during the first month of 2010!

Home. This conjures up different things for each of us. These twelve featured artists have hand printed a variety of works on their interpretation of this theme. They range from items that were in their home to houses to home plate (think baseball) to more conceptual ideas of where or what home can be.

Our featured artists for this twelfth and final month of 2009 are Amy Jean White, Brian Schuck, Brice Ben Hobbs, Clare Szydlowski, Fonda Murray, Greta Aalborg-Volper, Kacie Erin Smith, Kathe Welch, Laura K Alger, Laurel Prieto, Patricia Miye Wakida, and Trish Foschi.

Opening night:
Friday, Dec 4th from 5-9pm
The show will be up December 4 – 25

Rock Paper Scissors Gallery
2278 Telegraph Avenue,
Oakland, CA 94612

A social structure is something that is constructed to enhance the relationship between people through design. Designers of these structures feel that they are solving social problems through their projects, which affects communities and individuals on a personal level. Projects are related to addressing some basic needs such as shelter, communication, food security, safety, and intimacy.

As part of our Community Collaborations program local designer-builder Matt Wolpe will be worked with City Slickers Farms on a collaborative design project to teach community members build their own chicken tractors. The chicken tractor is an element in City Slickers’ vision to help residents of West Oakland to be more self sufficient and food secure. This project is an example of designers trying to engage underserved communities and provide innovative solutions to problems.

More information about the class can be found here – http://chickentractorproject.wordpress.com/

Check out the story the Oakland Tribune wrote – Residents get ready to raise chickens in West Oakland

Join us October 2nd at 7pm for the opening reception for an exhibition of paintings from three men – Kevin Cooper, James Anderson and Eddie Vargas. Two of them are condemned – on death row; the third has a life sentence – the other death penalty.

Prisoners are people that society is willing to throw away and ignore. But they are fathers, they are mothers, they are sons and daughters. They are artists. Some are guilty of heinous crimes, some are innocent, and all were too poor to have an attorney fairly represent them.  But they are all human beings and have a story to tell.

These three men use art to express themselves. We hope you will, see their work, hear their stories, and take away an understanding of their humanity from viewing it.
Opening night:
Friday Oct 2nd from 5-9pm
The show will be up October 1st – 31st

Rock Paper Scissors Gallery
2278 Telegraph Avenue,
Oakland, CA 94612

Additional Events:
JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH -  7 TO 9 PM – a memorial movie to Oscar Grant, with members of his family and Jack Bryson

STAN TOOKIE WILLIAMS LEGACY NETWORK: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17TH – 4 TO 6 PM – with Barbara Becnel and Stan Tookie Williams’ books for children.

LIVE FROM DEATH ROW: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23RD – 7 TO 9 PM – with Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on San Quentin’s death row calling (at 7:30 sharp). Q&A with Kevin Cooper and members of the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee.

Presented by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the only national membership-driven, grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment in the United States.
website: www.nodeathpenalty.org email: California@nodeathpenalty.org

Also by Art for a Democratic Society, an Oakland based art and activism group specializing in participatory grassroots interventionist art.
website: www.a4ds.org email: a4ds@earthlink.net

Rock Paper Scissors Collective presents ArtEsteem: Community Justice League
Opening Reception at Art Murmur, Friday, September 4th, 2009 6-9pm

ArtEsteem is an art and social justice program designed to enhance the emotional literacy, intellectual and practical skills of inner city children and youth. ArtEsteem invites students to create and explore imaginary and real replicas of themselves and their environment through literacy, art, photography, fashion design, science and field trips. ArtEsteem classes support youth in critically thinking about community and how history, perceptions, education, and intent intertwine to affect human relationships.

Proceeds from the sale of the art pieces supports the young artists in developing financial literacy and economic sustainability, contributes to the ArtEsteem Continuing Education Scholarship Fund, supports the promotion and production of ArtEsteem and the Traveling Exhibits.

Our future has never been certain, yet lately many people—the media, pundits, and even our friends and neighbors—feel entirely comfortable making confident assertions about impending tragedy. And as time moves us ever closer to this Tragedy (with a capital “T,” and as yet undefined), we feel like we should be prepared somehow for the events that we will surely face. Because every person’s version of the Tragedy must necessarily vary (because no one can accurately predict it), we would like to introduce the concept of Emergency Kits. Traditional in name only, these kits can be made to prepare for a specific emergency or more general crisis and only have one objective: to make you feel safe.

In this exhibition, the members of Cadresquad will interpret this call to safety. Each member of our collective will respond differently, with different priorities, yet all exploring natural or man-made tragedies, financial disasters and health crises.

About Cardresquad:Cadresquad, a cross-disciplinary conceptual artist collective, challenges the dominant patterns of thought that constrict individual and social development. We believe that art has an intrinsic social capacity to reach the public through physical interactions, contemplation and psychological spaces. Operating from multiple perspectives and artistic practices we connect through our commitment to stimulating social dialogue. Our media includes photography, installation, performance, video, and sculpture.

Cadresquad is: Rebecca Frediani, Dana Hemenway, Leah Markov-Lindsey, Carrie Maseredjian, Kasey Smith & Zan Truman

And be sure to check out the Clay Basics: Making a Japanese Tea Bowl in two parts (Aug 10, 12) taught by Zan Truman.  Sign up for the class on our calendar!

Invisible Ingredient brings together five up-and-coming digital artists from the Bay Area whose works uncover the hidden politics and histories of everyday phenomena. Each artist merges art, technology, and craft to make invisible ingredients visible. Miki Yamada Foster’s Feminist Craft Corner explores the hidden politics of gender and sexuality by interweaving technology and craft, while Lindsay Kelley examines the borders of food and nonfood through video and text in Starvation Seeds. Nick Lally, Elizabeth Travelslight, and Rupa Dhillon expose everyday invisible phenomena ranging from the relationships between sound and light to the notion of memory and personal reflection. Through the use of electronic sensors and computer programming, Nick Lally uncovers the beauty and complexity behind seemingly mundane data in his untitled series of digital prints, photographs, and accompanying mural. Elizabeth Travelslight explores the notion of personal identity, memory, and reflection in her assemblage series containing found furniture, textiles, and glass. Rupa Dhillon exposes the visibility of sound in (Re)Sounding Light through the use of electronics, beads, and deconstructed musical instruments.

(Re)Sounding Light, by Rupa Dhillon
(Re)Sounding Light explores the relationship between sound and sight though an interactive sonic chandelier that can be touched and spoken to. It takes sound from the audience, which is normally thought of as invisible, and uses its vibrational character to create motion within the chandelier. This motion causes a series of deconstructed instruments to vibrate and generate additional sounds, while also causing the light reflected from the chandelier’s beads to dance around the space. This artwork reveals that the experience of sound goes beyond what is heard: that it can also be seen.
Bio: Rupa Dhillon holds a BSc in Music Technology from London Metropolitan University and an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz. Her work combines software, electronics and music in order to explore the experiential qualities of sound and investigate issues of accessibility for those with sensory impairments.

Feminist Craft Corner, by Miki Yamada Foster
Feminist Craft Corner is a public access television show and an installation of collaborative Do-It-Yourself (DIY) experiments in crafting and technology. The public access show invites the audience to question their assumptions about how we speak about technology and who can speak for it. The episodes enact a queer staging of media production for the purposes of educating its audience about the intersections of DIY, crafting and technology. These interactive craft pieces encourage participants to playfully engage with objects through the activation of a queer and feminist framework, produced through the selection of content and the construction of form.
Bio: Miki Yamada Foster is a queer hapa multimedia artist from Seattle, Washington. She is a maker of comics, zines, small crafted things, installations and experimental documentaries. Her current work investigates the intersections between DIY crafting and radical feminism and queer theory through the creation of feminist video productions and electronic crafting materials. She received her Bachelors of Arts at the Evergreen State College with an emphasis in Film and Gender and Race Studies.

Starvation Seeds, by Lindsay Kelley
Lindsay Kelley’s Starvation Seeds is a video installation, a cookbook, and a research initiative. Throughout the project, Kelley asks the simple question “what is food?” Many of the practices referred to in Starvation Seeds exist at the limit of intelligible cuisine and are not understood as food or eating; such practices might be pathologized as “pica” (the ingestion of nonfood) or viewed in relationship to malnutrition and starvation as refeeding. Such practices reveal bodies at their limits. Starvation Seeds at Invisible Ingredient presents videos documenting the preparation of three fringe foods, opportunities to taste and prepare these foods, and a small book documenting Kelley’s recipe development process.
Bio: Lindsay Kelley researches fringe foods, experimental ingestion, and representations of people and plants in narratives of conquest. She has exhibited and published in the United States, Canada, and Australia. She recently completed a dissertation in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California Santa Cruz about food, biotechnology and contemporary art, focusing on artists who use biological processes or “wet ware,” and also holds a MFA in Digital Art and New Media from UCSC.

Untitled, by Nick Lally
Untitled is a series of large-format digital prints and a painted mural inspired by the prints. The prints feature visualizations of large amounts of environmental data (sound and light levels) collected over the course of a day using custom-built sensors. The seemingly mundane data is visualized in unexpected, complex and beautiful ways. The project unlocks new potentials for the performance of large amounts of data over time. The visualizations break from the traditional model of graphing data along a time axis; rather than the movement of time instigating the movement of the data, light levels determine its trajectory and path. The work encourages the viewer to understand the everyday in a new way, through its defamiliarization.
Bio: Nick Lally creates multimedia work that explores citizens’ experiences living in a society ruled by the logic of the informational network. His work encourages viewers to think about the ways that those changes are manifested and to explore new possibilities for subjective experiences afforded by those technologies. His work takes the form of digital media, prints, video projections, sound, sculpture, photographs, drawings and paintings. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California Santa Cruz. He is a founding member of the Artclash Collective and the Thunderwhip Design Collective.

Experimental Archives / Collaborative Media Studies, by Elizabeth Travelslight
Experimental Archives / Collaborative Media Studies brings together four of the most recent developments of Bay Area artist Elizabeth Travelslight. Her works are primarily concerned with knowledge making and knowledge sharing before and beyond the written word. In particular, Travelslight’s works revolve around feminist intertwinings—literal weavings—of texts and textiles and the use of intricately etched mirrors that playfully introduce unexpected possibilities of sight and subject position. Her work explores the inherent tensions and libratory potential between remembering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, holding on and letting go; all towards the re-forging of new paradigms of relationship.
Bio: Transnationally made and Bay Area born, Elizabeth Travelslight is thirty-three. Orchestrating collisions between material and digital media, she hopes to continue her explorations of writing and philosophy through conceptual art, curious objects, and installations that demonstrate the possibilities of folk art and craft with contemporary technology. She is a graduate student with the Digital Arts New Media MFA program at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Rock Paper Scissors Collective presents “Tendril”
Opening Reception at Art Murmur, Friday June 5th, 2009 6-9pm

“Tendril” an Oakland textile show brings together an eclectic group of textile artists who share a passion for fabrics and thread as their main mediums. The artists in this group show are also tied together by their exploration of scavenging and collage. Found materials, ideas, and images are scattered throughout all the pieces from illustrative quilts, to silkscreened prints, to “Thinking Caps.”

A perfect fit for RPS, each artist in this show is searching for ways to integrate art with life, exploring everyday adornment, and moving with ease back and forth across the lines of art and craft.

Artists:
Amber Collison, originally from Portland Oregon, has called Oakland home for the past six years. While teaching a textiles class she became interested in exploring mixed media. Her body of work shows embroidery in a different-than-usual context. In this exhibition, Collison provides a kaleidoscope of colors and paper all meeting together to form a “fun miracle of death.”

Amy Cools has been drawn to working with fabric and textiles since a small child. Over the years, Cools taught herself new techniques and skills, and her art quilts are top-stitched, highly textured, and pictorial; and although meant primarily for display, fully functional as bed quilts. Cools has also struck out on her own as a full-time fashion designer, designing and selling her own all-original line, AC Clothing and Bags at her shop Afterglow in Oakland.

Helene Poulshock is interested in creating a vocabulary of images that combine and repeat endlessly to insinuate new meaning. In her printmaking, she generates the building blocks of this vocabulary; including woodcuts, silkscreens, and stencils. Her linen canvases are the result of a vocabulary of silkscreened elements that are printed by using the screens like collage pieces.

Mali Mrozinski constructs wearable pieces using paint, fabric, and salvaged ephemera that metaphorically and conceptually reflect the wearer’s identity. Her garments explore our rituals, habits, neuroses, and histories, as well as the intimacies of the body. Mrozinski is fascinated by our need for texture and tactile experience, and the ways in which we create personal relationships with comfort. By creating pieces that speak to art and personal adornment, she integrates art with life, and vice versa.

Also join RPS for silkscreen and textile classes and events throughout the month of June. Visit www.rpscollective.com/webcal for more information.

The exhibition runs from June 5th – June 27th. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Sunday, 12-7pm.

Rock Paper Scissors Collective presents Heroes and Villains
Opening Reception at Art Murmur, Friday April 3rd, 2009 6-9pm

Please join RPS in an epic exhibition of work focusing on the age-old struggle of good versus evil. The artists in the exhibition offer a new and interesting eye on the classic dichotomy of chivalry and ugliness, portraiture and caricature, love and death. Artists include: Arnell Ando, Teppei Ando, Graham Annable, David Ball, Ben Catmull, Mary Cook, Alika Cooper, Matt Hart, Matt Hewitt, Obi Kaufman, An Nguyen, Jonah Olson, Deth P. Sun, Mark Todd, Derek Wood.

The exhibition runs from April 3rd – April 25th. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Sunday, 12-7pm.