Oakland's Monthly Art Murmur for Experimental Art

Juan Aguilera, ink and acrylic on paper, 22x30"

If there is an ideal Friday this month to hop across the Bay and explore the thriving Downtown Oakland neighborhoods your friends have been prattling on about, it is this one – always the first one. From 6 – 9pm, a slew of galleries will open their doors for Oakland Art Murmur’s monthly art walk. Full of dogged self-starters and no home for the risk-averse, the Oakland gallery scene routinely welcomes work that the more cosmopolitan corners of the SF circuit are prone to overlook. Here are four picks from the East Bay’s ever-growing frontier.

Out of the Blue
Blue somehow achieves a power beyond its pigment, carrying a serene glumness, sorrow or anguish in its tone. The blues expressed a more particular anguish – that belonging to African Americans in the Deep South around the turn of the 20th century. The blues also employed a succinct narrative grip and improvisational flare that came to define a century of American music making. It had a dynamism belied by its eponymous, subdued color palette.

In Creative Growth’s Out of the Blue, a number of artists take inspiration from blues music’s profound moodiness, storytelling and innovativeness, and turn these dynamic qualities back on the world of physical art objects to produce bluesy compositions in wood, drawing, painting and ceramics. The effect promises to be rich, vocal, enlivening – another singular moment in the legacy of a color.

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