Our first Saturday bilingual See & Make Art Tours are a favorite part of our month! We love opening our doors to new (and returning) families and kids, showing them the art in our galleries, hearing what they think and inspiring them to create art during a hands-on activity. Last month we were lucky to have Malcolm Marshall of the Richmond Pulse as one of our guests. He shares his experience in the April edition of the paper and online.
We hope you’ll stop by this Saturday, April 4 or on May 2 for one of our free tours, which are designed so the whole family can take part. Please meet the group at 3:00 pm in the Madeline F. Whittlesey Community Room at the Richmond Public Library, Main Branch (325 Civic Center Plaza) and we’ll walk as a group over to the Art Center.
Children and families explored their creative spirits together by seeing and making art at a bilingual art tour hosted by the Richmond Art Center March 7.
Lauren Ari, a teacher at the art center, led the group of about 10 on a guided tour of the center’s galleries, along with a hands-on art-making activity. Children’s ages ranged from 3 to 8.
Over the course of four decades, Mildred Howard has created rich and evocative work by taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with the spark of meaning to illuminate the underlying significance and historical weight of cultural form. In free-standing sculpture, in wall-mounted musings, in graphic explorations and in representations of shelter, Howard has developed a language to address racism, injustice, need and compassion.
Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter showcased a selection of works that present some of the artist’s most iconic sculptures as well as graphic works never before exhibited. Long admired for her direct and forthright reflections on society, Howard will be exhibiting work which incorporates her own image, popular images and anonymous photography. Whether taking found objects for use in assemblage or layering complex collaged works on paper, Howard imbues her artwork with the spirit of personal and community history as she reveals the matter at hand in the materiality of the object. Guest curated by Jan Wurm.
KQED Arts is a phenomenal resource for educators, parents and art-loving folks of the Bay Area, so you can imagine how honored we were when writer Kristin Farr covered our 50th Annual WCCUSD Student Show as a part of Arts Education Month.
We think this article perfectly caps off a great month of arts education coverage — thanks KQED Arts!
We hope you will come celebrate with these students and their families during our special reception on Thursday, April 23 from 5 – 7 pm.
Since moving into their custom-made facility in 1951, the Richmond Art Center has offered art classes for all ages and held regular exhibitions. And since 1965, the Center’s annual student art exhibition has given young East Bay artists the chance to show their work in a professional space and inspire the Richmond Art Center community.
This year, celebrating its 50th anniversary, the student exhibition features work by over 200 students, as well as that of returning students and faculty.
As the Art Center’s Teri Gardiner explains — addressing the Art Center’s long-term commitment to young people — founder Hazel Salmi believed that an artist lies within everyone. “The exhibition celebrates and showcases the students’ creativity,” Gardiner says, “and the important role that art plays in education.”
An amazing team from KTVU stopped by last month to produce this short documentary about our work. The video aired last night at the Lesher Center for the Arts before a talk by Robert Edsel, the author of The Monuments Men.
Our third annual Upcycle maker event is just one month away — Saturday, April 25 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm.
We’re busy planning a full afternoon of art-making for the whole family. A dozen upcycle workstation will feature hands-on activities to let you turn materials that would otherwise be headed for the landfill into art. Cool, right?
Well, we need a little help sourcing some of these materials and figured our amazing and creative community would be a great place to start.
The SF Chronicle featured our exhibition Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter on the cover of the Datebook. Writer Jesse Hamlin stopped by the Richmond Art Center to preview this four-decade survey and to speak with Berkeley artist Mildred Howard.
We hope you will join us for one of the many public programs associated with this exhibition. This solo exhibition runs through May 24.
Mildred Howard plunged about 130 butcher knives into a wall at the Richmond Art Center, where her 2005 installation “Safe House” is being re-created for “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter,” a four-decade survey of the Berkeley artist’s provocative and poetic work that opens Sunday, March 22.
The piece, originally created for the opening of San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, juxtaposes the knives with a metal-framed, house-like structure whose floor is covered with silver and silver-plated domestic objects — chandeliers, platters, creamers, teapots — that go from polished to tarnished. It’s one of a series of pieces exploring the notion of “home” that the prolific assemblage and installation artist has made over the past 20 years, in addition to creating wry smaller-scale sculptures, graphic work and big civic projects such as “Three Shades of Blue” — a series of blue glass panels on the Fillmore Street bridge over Geary Boulevard, etched with a jazz-themed poem by Quincy Troupe — and the “Salty Peanuts” sculpture at San Francisco International Airport, composed of 130 saxophones.
The Richmond Art Center is proud to announce the 3rd Annual Upcycle, a maker festival for the whole family to create, see and learn about the art of upcycling. This free event will take place, rain or shine, on Saturday, April 25 from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
Upcycling workstations will feature hands-on activities that creatively re-use materials otherwise headed for the landfill. Learn how to screen print patches, make bags from old ties and denim, create mosaics, weave rag rugs and create metal objects and recycled jewelry.
This event will also feature activities by numerous participating organizations, including Urban Tilth and Bridge Art Space. Healthy snacks will be provided. Kids under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.
This event is generously sponsored by: Kaiser Permanente
The Richmond Art Center announces its spring exhibitions which includes an exhibition of works by artist Mildred Howard, plus a milestone 50 years of the annual exhibition of the West Contra Costa Unified School District Student Show. These exhibitions will open with a reception on Saturday, Mar 21 from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
The main exhibition, Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter, will showcase works by Bay Area artist Mildred Howard. Over the course of four decades, Howard has created rich and evocative work by taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with meaning to illuminate the underlying significance and historical weight of cultural form. In free-standing sculpture, in wall-mounted musings, in graphic explorations and in representations of shelter, Howard has developed a language to address racism, injustice, need and compassion.
Howard’s work is already familiar to those living in Richmond, her public installation, Moving Richmond,, a work in which a poem by Macarthur Fellow Ishmael Reed was incised into a forty-foot wall of faceted steel can be seen at Richmond’s BART Station.
We are seeing so many articles and studies these days which point to the many benefits of arts education. This latest article, Arts Education Transforms Societies, from the Huffington Post creates a link to what we’ve been saying for a while: Creativity and independent thinking are the skills that will create tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.
Plus these amazing statistics and facts about Arts Education:
1,500 CEOs from around the world named creativity as the leading skill needed for business success.
Arts education increases employment rates by raising high-school graduation rates.
Low-income students who are highly engaged in the arts are more than twice as likely to graduate from college as their peers with no arts education.
Low-income students with a high participation in the arts have a dropout rate of 4 percent, in contrast to their peers with a low participation in the arts who have a dropout rate of 22 percent.
This year, our Art in the Community program will bring free programs to teach more than 1,600 local children through dozens of after-school and summer programs at elementary, middle and high schools, community centers, the Richmond Main Public Library and our most recent addition, a day-time program at Washington Elementary School in Richmond. These programs are entirely supported through the generosity of foundations, businesses and individuals.
This past Sunday, hundreds of people gathered at the Richmond Art Center to celebrate the life of Kato Jaworski, our long-time friend, a creative artist and the admired Studio Art Director of the Art Center, who passed away on December 28, 2014 after a serious illness. It was a beautiful day that fully embraced the unique person that we’ve been lucky and honored to have known since she became part of the Richmond Art Center in 2005, and it celebrated the incredible community that Kato created here. You can view the memorial program here.
A slideshow of images of Kato and her artwork. Thank you to everyone who contributed images.
