This winter’s weekend of non-stop art (Saturday and Sunday, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. that is) offered a wide variety of media, location, scale, and nuance to attendees. We stopped by a handful of the studios made open to the public as a part of the biannual East Bay Open Studios. Below is the final installment for this year, but we’re eager to see what next Spring has in store.
Kathleen King & Jo Ann Biagini
1228 30th St, Oakland
December 7 & 8, 2024
By Agustín Maes
I like readymade art. If it’s done well and thoughtfully, objects placed in space just-so, these intentional arrangements tweak something in my brain. They ping my aesthetic antennae and perk up my visual ears to the silent story the pieces tell.
King’s studio mate, Jo Ann Biagini, creates works that are less conceptual and beautiful in their own right. Using Rives BFK (Blanchet Frères & Kiebler, a classic and heavyweight printmaking paper) as a base, Biagini takes images from old photography and textbooks, covers them with gel medium and then smooths them down with a tiny roller, over and over again until the pages are made rough and organic-looking. The images become faded, no longer resembling their originals. Biagini will often also make laser copies of particular images then transfer them back to the roller-roughened paper with a matte medium.
Continue reading here.
We also visited Patricia Guthrie and Shellz at Jingletown Studios.
Vita Hewitt
Jackknife Studios for Carla Golder, Steve Javiel, and John Casey.
Sarah Bass
Katie McCann and Marsha Balian at Balian’s home studio.
Agustín Maes
And East Bay Photo Collective’s “Momentum.”
Vita Hewitt
The littlest, mightiest dancer in town kicked things off back in June,
And Agustín also made some furry friends.
We’d love to come by your space next year! Drop a line and let us know when and where to be at midbrowoakland@gmail.com
