Eclectic Offerings
Flamenco dancers, Nutcracker spin-offs and visual delights.
Monterey County is vast, but the art world is very small indeed, criss-crossing the county’s miles of lettuce fields, acres of redwood forest and blocks of waterfront luxury homes with a network of relationships that ...
Picture This
Local galleries, museums mount interesting exhibitions despite economic pressures.
Tough economic times have hit the visual arts world, but dedicated artists keep working, and dealers, gallerists, curators and collectors who share a passionate belief in the value of art and artists continue to support ...
Scotch Tapes
Visiting fiddlers revive tradition with new spirit.
My grandpa was a rascal and a fiddler. Now, it’s not absolutely necessary to be a rascal in order to play the Scottish fiddle, but “attitude” is definitely required. That’s what more than a hundred ...
Photo Finish?
The rise, fall – and revival – of the Center for Photographic Art.
It was a rich old time by all accounts, when genius walked afoot on the Big Sur Coast, when the dining tables of Carmel Highlands homes were pounded during passionate speeches by talented inebriates of ...
Men, Considered
CPA photography show by Tobin Keller is a triumph of technique and subject matter.
The crisp white-on-white space is all clean angles and shadowed planes interacting formally as in an early Cubist painting. Here at the Center for Photographic Arts exhibition, Tobin Keller: Six Decades of Men and Other ...
Ruhl of the Road
Western Stage constructs a droll portrait of emotional family clutter.
At one point in The Clean House at The Western Stage, a perfect, poised, pristine, professional woman in white and usually in control breaks down in front of the audience, crying and laughing at the ...
Added Dimensions
Christel Dillbohner’s Topographies installation transforms the Carl Cherry with texture and depth.
The architecture of the Carl Cherry Center is satisfying just by itself: light, shadow, volume, materials, history, ideas– a harmony that activates each gallery. In this space all the arts are offered thoughtfully. Topographies, an ...
Bard to Be Wild
PacRep’s The Comedy of Errors delivers a deliciously ridiculous work befitting one of Shakespeare’s wackiest comedies.
A cornrow-coiffed Solinus, Duke of Ephesus, rolls onstage high atop a yellow airline staircase, leering, playing sax, sipping a toxic-green cocktail and wearing glam rock gold lamé and platform heels. This vision takes the edge ...
Good Sh*t, Sherlock
Western Stage’s version of the detective legend is high grade.
What 21st century citizen has not pondered the fate of the most famous Victorian detective, the greatest detective of all? You haven’t? Funny, nor have I. But no matter if you give not a whit, ...
Of Steinbeck and Mexico
Annual festival celebrates Salinas’ native son, and, this year, his love of Mexico, its people and culture.
Today and for the next few days, a man is being remembered and celebrated by the national institution created around his life, ideas and legacy. John Steinbeck was a writer and thinker, born in Salinas, ...
Blacklist Revisited
Carl Cherry Center celebrates its 60th anniversary with a theme dear to its roots.
If you can’t count on youth to make a fuss when a fuss is required, call up the old warriors– and stand back. Upon the occasion of its birthday, the Carl Cherry Center for the ...
Child of a Dark Era
Barbara James of Carmel Valley recalls what her parents went through.
Excerpts from an interview of Barbara James by Maureen Davidson My parents, Dan and Lillith James, were blacklisted. Not, I think, because of their intrinsic value as targets, but because my father was assistant director ...
Mora in Store
The legendary Jo Mora finds new life (again) with three special exhibits.
Perhaps history is the last refuge of romantics. Indeed, Monterey County is the richer for the infatuation with history by two men separated by a century. Peter Hiller, 56, has taught art at the All ...
Monochrome Magic
Michael Kenna’s photographs reveal the rewards of patience.
Very still, this square: night stillness, with a halo of light emanating from behind an erect trio of cigarillo-slender smokestacks. Two bristling tangles of pipes and lights, and then at dead center, that familiar monumental ...
Walking Meditation
Robert Larson and the Marlboro Man.
Digital communication floods modern human existence so inescapably that its ubiquitous grid structure has become the normal page on which daily life is written and filmed, bulletined, messaged and photographed. Santa Cruz artist Robert Larson ...
Vivid hues and sure strokes lay bare the fisherman’s life in MMA exhibit.
You could say that Armin Hansen was a Method painter. His sure and knowing lines tell, with deep authority, every secret his subjects hold. His inspired gutsiness of color is shocking because, in spite of ...
Permeating Borders
Son de la Frontera embodies flamenco’s deepest roots and broadest fusion at Sunset Center
First, there are family lineages as consequential as any David begat in the Holy Bible, bloodlines as minutely codified as any Godolphin Arabian’s running through Man O’ War. It’s thick and heavy, the scrutiny that ...
Drawing Room
Hartnell College exhibit shows fine lines of the creative process.
The artists’ model is hunched forward, leaning into a sturdy staff. My drafting pencil is poised just above the surface of the page as I pause for an inward breath… Suddenly, from behind, my drawing ...
Minimalist Lens
Dresser exhibit in Carmel shows photographer’s growth over 25-year period.
Waters sprint over rocks in a breathless frisson, effervescing the center of “Rushing Water, Virginia River, Zion National Monument, Utah, 1989.” They sweep the light across the rectangle in a bright rushing stripe, contrasting with ...
Spreading Its Wings
Youth Arts Collective’s new Monterey home provides more space for students, art, community.
Inhale it as a tonic: The upbeat atmosphere and the passionate people who conjure it, at the Youth Arts Collective in their new digs at 472 Calle Principal in Old Monterey. This Saturday, YAC celebrates ...
Bridging Cultures
“Gordo” opened U.S. readers to Mexico; its creator to be honored for his lifetime achievement.
“You don’t make any noise when you’re thinking,” Gus Arriola says when we meet in his Carmel home, his wife Mary Francis adding to the tale of their life with “Gordo” the comic strip Gus ...
Imagery Conscious
Roberto Salas’ display at PGAC rivets the viewer with its symbolism and thought.
The walls of the Gil Gallery at Pacific Grove Art Center rang with a Gershwin rag played by an accidental musician grooving on solitude and a grand piano on a quiet Sunday afternoon during The ...
Delectable Bites
In the visual and theater arts, something for everyone to get excited about.
In numerology, 2008 is a “1” year, meaning beginnings, creation, invention. It will be a propitious year for the arts in Monterey County. The juggler balancing on a spinning ball lives by his art. One ...
Hearty Winter Fare
PacRep’s The Full Monty satisfies theatergoers’ hunger for edgy, character-driven musical-comedy.
For years, a clipped-out BC Sunday comic was pinned to my office wall. In the drawing, one animal character slumps against a rock saying, “I’m going to turn this experience into a book about the ...
Ripe For Change
Enhancing Salinas’ art scene is viewed as key component to future economic development.
In the fertile soil of Salinas Valley, a new crop is coming into season. Pushing up through the crust of years, Salinas, the city at the center of “the salad bowl of the world,” is ...
Thruppence Worth
Western Stage presents a convincing London underworld in Threepenny Opera.
A fair amount of flesh is involved in the all-out bawdy “I’m bad, very bad” version of The Threepenny Opera at the Western Stage. In the in-the-round closeness of the Studio Theater at Hartnell College, ...
Earth Force
An extraordinary exhibition of ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu closes in one week.
A naked, coarsely-pocked body of red earth is draped with a lustrous sheen of settled ash. A slash of luminous cobalt cuts through the quiet ochre of limonite. A smooth, fine-pored torso of white shines ...
Enchanted Evening
PacRep delivers a magical Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A giant moon glimmered at the elbow of a towering Monterey pine above the stage of the Outdoor Forest Theater on preview night of Pac Rep’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oh, it was not a ...
New Wave
Wave Street Studios launches recording powerhouse from granny’s house.
Invention is about 40 feet wide and very, very deep at 777 Wave St., where a stolid and respectable little 1919-vintage granny cottage sits primly on the slope overlooking Cannery Row. It sits atop three ...
Playing with Scissors
Henri Matisse: Jazz plays beautifully.
[ MJF50 ] He cuts to the quick, cuts away the ordinary, cuts out the cliché, cuts until he finds the essence. His curves aren’t mad, he says, he knows they bend around the vertical ...
Creative Economy
Monterey County’s first-ever arts and culture plan debuts Sept. 14.
The ripple of a new idea can create a sea of change. Decades ago, John Naisbitt’s Megatrends took a deep look at business and social systems worldwide in a simple, evocative book that had a ...
Crown Cousins
Mary Stuart explores the complex relationship between two queens.
The pure notes of an Elizabethan canticle swell to quiet the chatter of an opening night crowd and fill the air with keen expectation. As the lights dim all eyes are drawn to the stage ...
Big Upheaval in Arts Landscape
Indeed, in the visual arts the bite of change is in the air.
FALL'07ARTS THE EXHIBITION OPENING THIS FRIDAY announces that a new day has dawned at the Monterey Museum of Art (MMA). Christel Dillbohner, a German-born, Berkeley-based artist, has taken on the giant gallery at MMA’s La ...
Endangered: Local Artists
Can artists and new ideas survive in this county?
FALL'07ARTS WE ARE KNOWN WORLDWIDE for the artists, writers and visionaries who worked here more than a half century ago. And for the inconceivable wealth of both the Monterey Jazz Festival (now 50) and the ...
No Exit for Theater Arts
No Exit for Theater Arts
FALL'07ARTS THERE IS NEVER A SAFETY ZONE for the theater arts. No matter if its a young thespian playing a zebra in front of an admiring audience of friends and relatives in a stage production ...
Classical Music Rocks
Commissions, competitions, premieres enliven classical music scene
FALL'07ARTS THE MUSIC GENERALLY CALLED CLASSICAL might in fact spring from any era within the last four centuries. This inexact genre is well represented on the Peninsula by the grande dame Carmel Music Society entering ...
Destination South
Morro Bay
DISTANCE: 20-160 miles or two-3.5 hours drive. DIRECTIONS: For efficiency and speed, Highway 101 south is the sensible choice. For pure beauty, the coast road—Highway 1 through Big Sur, Cayucas, and San Simeon—is glorious. Morro ...
Mad Ambition
Macbeth begins the Carmel Shake-speare Festival with a nightmare in the round.
No question that the audience has been barraged by daily images of strife, noise and peril, embittered by governance that clasps to its chest every possible vestige of power, dulled by daytime television enactments of ...
Crafting a City
Sand City’s West End Celebration helps define the town.
Elena Salsedo is cooking up more than galettes in her blink-and-you’ve-passed-it Sweet Elena’a café in Sand City. When the gutsy Frenchwoman established her teensy fine-art bakery in the industrial outpost of Sand City in 1994, ...
So So Fresh
Wild Plum Café&Bakery wins for its flavor and character.
The first testimonial for the Wild Plum awaited us as we entered the modest eatery: Bill occupied one of the butcher-papered tables against the wall, waiting for lunch. His high expectations positively lit the room. ...
Viva la Myth
Zoot Suit revives the spirit of El Pachuco.
A giant blade sliced through from behind the printed curtain hanging center-stage, through the large headlines—Los Angeles, 1943—through the hum of a bustling audience that filled the room as the second preview performance of >>Zoot ...
Keeping It Real
In its 70th season, Bach Fest still taps early roots to find true sounds.
Seventy-three years ago in the bohemian hamlet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, the industrious and freespirited matersfamilias of high arts and culture, Dene Denny and Hazel Watrous, noticed a need, and created something exquisite to fill it. Quickly, ...
Weekend in the Highlands
The 40th Annual Monterey Scottish Games and Celtic Festival wraps Toro Park in plaid.
“KILTIE, KILTIE, KILTIE,” we formed a skipping parade behind the highlander who was probably in the city for the day...my brat pack: Glasgow, Scotland, mid-1950s. Urban Scots as we were, the sight of a man ...
Pegi Young Debuts in Big Sur
Neil's wife finally takes the lead.
A band oozes into a languid two-step country blues, lilted by a harmonica and the resonant twang of a guitar played slack-key style. The singer joins on the upbeat, her voice girlish but smoky, lazy ...
Unbelievable Truth
Remarkable characters tell an impossible tale at Carl Cherry Center.
The opening scene of Foreign Women offers, on the altar of Carl Cherry Center’s tiny theater, the tantalizing promise of characters we are prepared to care about. A few rows of folding chairs fill a ...
A Trip to the Past
Western Stage’s
I had a little conversation with myself on my way to see the Western Stage production of William Inge’s Bus Stop on its opening night at Hartnell College on Friday. I’d already formed an opinion ...
The Art of Summer
A look at the creative options for area kids this summer.
The research is clear: Consistent participation in any form of the creative arts helps children succeed both academically and socially. What a tragedy that class time for substantive arts programs in K-12 public education has ...
Sicilian Sequel
Favaloro’s reincarnation recalls what made it a PG landmark.
Since I came to Monterey County only a short time ago, many people have mentioned Favaloro’s in the course of conversation. It seemed such an integral part of the Pagrovian life that I was surprised ...
Paint Fearless
David Fleming is unafraid to tackle any subject.
I know the gnaw of remorse that visits a sportsman who has battled an enormous fish almost to the boat before the line snaps, and the glimpse of a fin, the outline of a silvery ...
Artists’ Journey
Belle Yang documentary tells a Chinese immigrant family’s story.
A gaily painted kite bucks and twists in the wind, tail snapping loudly as it soars, seemingly fragile, but jerking hard against the string held taught by an elderly man below. Joseph Yang and his ...
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