Encinitas Friends of the Arts Presents Passport to Brazil

By Patricia Frischer

Encinitas Friends of the Art presented Passport to Brazil on Sat. April 28 f at the Encinitas Community Center and it was like having a night in Rio. The room was transformed, the food was outstanding and the dancing was contagious.
Pictures by Patricia Frischer and John Campbell. 

Naimeh Tahna Woodward, the queen of Passport to Brazil. Her parties are not to be missed. .

One of the missions of EFA is to celebrate diversity through arts and culture at the same time as raising funds for much needed arts programs in the city. So a party like this is a win win for everybody. 

The MC for the evening was Brent Ringoot with a translation assist from  Ana Helena Silveira 

Mayor of Encinitas, Catherine Blakespeare made opening remarks and was a special guest.

Cajuina is a San Diego based band specializing in authentic Forró, Samba, Bossa Nova and Musica Popular Brasileira. Performers include Bahia-born Lucas Lima on guitar and vocals, Stefanie Schmitz on saxophone and clarinet, Emi Cara on percussion, and Ben Rempel on drums. They are best known for getting a high energy dance party started.

Pra Jogar Capoeire

Super Sonic Samba School plays traditional samba rhythms of Brazil, featuring live percussionists, singers and dancers. The school was founded in 1990 with the mission to spread the vibrant Brazilian culture through drum and dance. www.sambasd.org

Brazilian dancer Dina Bedenko also performed. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Energia Entertainment, producing and curating cultural events, and merging visual and performing arts.

The back ground for the performers was created by Patricia Frischer consisteing of four 7’ banners. The banners are an homage to major Brazilian artist, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), who is known as the mother of contemporary art in that country with a style called tropical abstraction.

Artist Heather Gibb will display her exotic masks, which are hand-crafted from papier-mâché, and designed for theatre costumes. They are beautiful and functional artwork.

Painting by Aline Spellmeier 

Barrels & Branches Nursery as part of the shopping at the Brazilian marketplace

Delicious Brazilian-inspired food and drink was provided by Da Fazenda.

Attendees enjoy making Samba Shakers helped by some of the youngest volunteers.

Raffle tickets for 6 gift baskets full of goodies. How about the lucky one who won The Girl From Ipanema (Tropical Purse, Music CD, Brazilian Flag Pendant Necklace, Airbrush Tanning Session, Bikini Basic Sugaring Melt & Wax).

You are Home: Lynn Susholtz

You Are Home, is a public art installation by Lynn Susholtz at 4200 Texas Street San Diego, CA 92104 

The public art created for Community HousingWorks, North Park Senior Apartments is a celebration of community spirit, pride and culture. Multiple art elements utilize light and shadow throughout the project including; 

• a 18’ft tall light tower/obelisk and sconces along Texas St. made of cut aluminum and colored LED lights, 
• symbols and designs made of shaped and colored acrylic hanging in the courtyard, 
• a large array of multi-colored shapes in the form of a “sundial” 4 floors up on a south facing wall. The wall, visible from a distance, displays a compass that points due north representing the direction toward home and the North Star- a constant in the sky just beyond the project wall. The “sundial” creates colored shadows that move throughout the day, casting shapes and symbols onto the wall.  The artwork is a colorful and festive celebration of life and light, changing throughout the day and night with the natural cycles of sun and stars. 

Ideas for the artworks were developed after input from the San Diego LGBT Center’s Senior Art Group. Lynn Susholtz of Stone Paper Scissors, and architect, Carlos Rodriguez, of Rodriguez Design Associates, both local businesses, collaborated on making the art an intrinsic part of the building and streetscape.  

Lynn Susholtz is founder/director of Stone Paper Scissors and Art Produce, a unique artist-run storefront exhibition space and community cultural center in North Park. Stone Paper Scissors integrates community voice and vision into the cultural and physical landscape through art and education. 

Projects have included the planning of public spaces, developing public arts initiatives for neighborhoods, and integrating art into capital projects. Commissions for public and private spaces, range from affordable housing to playscapes for children to the design of community gardens. Susholtz’s art practice ranges in scale from small drawings that explore the cultural context and social histories of everyday objects to large-scale interactive environments, while employing a strong social engagement component that blends the virtual and physical community. Stone Paper Scissors received a 6th “Orchid” award in 2017 for public art from the San Diego Architectural Foundation for Cypress Gates, a transitional homeless housing project in downtown San Diego. 

Local affordable housing developers, Community HousingWorks partnered with the LGBT Center of San Diego to provide homes that are open to all,  the North Park Senior Apartments. This is  an affirming and supportive environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender seniors. The community also shelters formerly homeless seniors in eight permanent supportive housing studios. “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Maya Angelou. There are only a handful of LGBT-affirming affordable communities for seniors in the nation. North Park Seniors is a 76 apartment, transit-oriented development completed in December of 2017 in the North Park Neighborhood of San Diego. North Park Seniors is trailblazing project, making strides for San Diego’s LGBT senior community as well as playing a substantial part in improving of the City’s Density Bonus law. Innovative and imaginative, North Park Seniors was designed and entitled as part of a sustainable, transit-oriented, mixed-income, 194 unit development.

For more info: Contact: Lynn Susholtz lynn@stonepaperscissors.org 

Gabrielle Bakker and David Adey at Lux Institute

By Patricia Frischer

Gabrielle Bakker arrived from Seattle to work with only a month to complete a work of art measuring 36 by 40 inches as part of the artist residency program at Lux  Art Institute. She usually works extremely slowly, completing a painting only after many many revisions. She is painstaking in her attention to a realistic style which combines many genres of art. So she had to do many many studies to resolve issues of composition, color and light so that  this work could be resolved in the time frame. once she arrived.  If you visit Lux you will see all the working drawing that she brought with her as well as the progress on this new work

Bakker has used oil paint sometimes mixed it with egg tempera and has taught herself about gold leafing and framing. She recently has begun to cloth her figures in contemporary outfits but the art still has an old master feel. Her works is rich with symbolism and allusions to mythology and history.

Gabrielle Bakker is in studio until May 5 and her work on view until June 2.

Read more about Bakker in the La Jolla Light by Lonnie Burstein Hewitt

The artist  Gabrielle Bakker in Lux studio

Work in progress

diarama study with lighting

studies

Study

study

study

Final black and white study

The artist working on her canvas.

David Adey and showing a few new and a few older works in the lobby of the Education Pavillion. This obsessively crafted work makes for compulsive viewing.. 

22 footer. is made from hundreds of lips cut out of fashion magazines

Detail

Hide 2 is made with  Laser-cut paper, fluorescent acrylic and pins on pvc foam panel. Three dimensional scan of artist’s body containing over 75k triangulated faces is unfolded and flattened in one piece, then condensed into 4 layers.

Station Eleven, The Big Read at Oceanside Museum of Art

By Patricia Frischer

Both Artifacts, Survival Is Insufficient  and the Museum of Civilization are exhibitions inspired by Station Eleven, the book chosen for the annual city wide Big Read. "The novel is set 20 years after a devastating flu pandemic destroys civilization as we know it. A woman moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians until they encounter a violent prophet who threatens the tiny band's existence."*  

For these exhibitions, Station Eleven revolves around the “artifacts” of a recently collapsed early 21st-century Western society. .An essential concept of Station Eleven is that survival requires more than basic needs, that there is value in art and creative expression that makes it intrinsic to life.  

Artifacts: Allied Craftsmen Of San Diego February 17–July 8, 2018

Gail Schneider, Wall of Lost Things, 2007

detail

Judith Christensen, Reciprocal for memories that can't possibly be there, 2017

detail

Cheryl Tall, Guardian (Zena) 2017

Kathy Nida, Give me time, 2016

Cheryl Nickel

Arline Fisch, Grandmother's Lace (Sedar plate), 2005

Survival Is Insufficient March 17–August 5, 2018The artists invited to take part in this exhibition—Joan Backes, Joe Brubaker and the Exquisite Gardeners, Larry and Debby Kline, Maidy Morhous, Susan Osborn, Lori Pond, Marisol Rendon, and Cory Sewelson

Joe Brubaker and the Exquisite Gardeners

Joe Brubaker and the Exquisite Gardeners

Joe Brubaker and the Exquisite Gardeners

Larry and Debby Kline

Cory Sewelson

Marisol Rendon

The Museum Of Civilization March 17–August 5, 2018
OMA’s lobby on custom-designed shelving by Luce et Studio and Vincent Designs. See the collection of items gathered as future artifacts.

On May12 from 6 to 8th there is a further opening of four more exhibitions exploring literature, language and storytelling through the visual arts. All these shows run until Sept 2. 

Janell Cannon: The Fuzzhead Tales
Joyce Cutler-Shaw: Embodied Language
David Fokos: The Book Pages Project
Sherry Karver: Collective Mythogogies

*Arthur Leander, a famous actor, dies on stage in the middle of a performance of King Lear. Jeevan, a man training to become an EMT, rushes the stage to try and save Arthur, but it’s too late. He ends up comforting Kirsten, a young girl, who witnesses Arthur’s death. Later that night, Jeevan walks home in the snow. His friend, an ER doctor, calls and tells Jeevan that a plane has arrived from Russia full of sick passengers who are dying. This is the beginning of the Georgia Flu pandemic, which will kill ninety-nine percent of the population.

Fifteen years later, civilization as readers know it no longer exists. There is no electricity, air travel, cars, or stores. All governments and economies have collapsed. Settlements are starting to emerge, as well as doomsday cults.

Fifteen years after the collapse of civilization, Kirsten is now a young woman and is part of a Traveling Symphony. The Symphony goes to different settlements to perform Shakespeare’s plays and classical music, but the world is full of danger. Charlie and Jeremy, two of Kirsten’s friends, left the Symphony while Charlie was pregnant to stay in one place until the baby is born. When the Symphony returns to get them after two years, Charlie, Jeremy, and the baby are missing after the settlement was overrun by a doomsday prophet.

The Symphony goes in search of their friends and is led to a rumored location called The Museum of Civilization, an airport settlement somewhere near Sovern City. As the group travels, flashbacks provide clues to who Arthur, Clark, Kirsten, Miranda, Jeevan and others were before the collapse of civilization. Arthur became a famous actor who married three times. Clark left his punk-rock days behind and got a PhD and became a successful businessman. Kirsten was a child actress who befriended Arthur before his death. Miranda left an abusive boyfriend for life in Hollywood until she realized that her husband was cheating on her. Jeevan used to be a paparazzo and entertainment journalist, but was looking for something more meaningful in his life and was training to become an EMT.

After the Symphony leaves one of the settlements, they find a stowaway in their midst. It’s a young girl who is promised to be the fourth wife of the prophet. Sayid, Dieter, and Sydney, three members of the Symphony, all vanish. Kirsten and August, another Symphony member, get separated from the group. They encounter followers of the prophet. His men have abducted the other Symphony members and he wants to trade them for the stowaway. Dieter accidentally dies while in custody. The prophet is prepared to kill the others to get what he wants. A young boy who is traveling with the prophet ends up shooting him.

Kirsten, August, and Sayid are within walking distance of the airport settlement. They meet Clark and are reunited with Charlie, Jeremy, and their daughter Annabel. Clark shows Kirsten evidence of an electrical grid coming on in the distance, and they are all left with the hope that civilization is about to reemerge.