Art Galleries

An autumn cornucopia of organic fruits and vegetables spills out of the unassuming cardboard box delivered to my front step.

Margaret Crocker's great-great-granddaughter discovered the secret of a fleur-de-lis brooch that is the crown jewel of "Treasures, Curiosities & Secrets: The Crockers and the Gilded Age," opening Wednesday at the Crocker Art Museum.

The "new" Crocker Art Museum, with its 125,000-square-foot expansion, will open to the public on Oct. 10, 2010, museum officials announced Friday.

At Grant High School, students partner with area farmers and local businesses to produce E.A.T.

"Geo-Morph: New Currents in Geometric and Biomorphic Abstraction" is the rather forbidding title of a show of works by mostly Northern California artists at the Pence Gallery in Davis.

Like quilts, which are often made to welcome a new being into the world or to mark the passing of another, "Amazing Wonders," a show of wall hangings by African Americans from Northern California at 40 Acres, is an occasion for both joy and sorrow.

The classic caramel apple gets a fall fashion makeover with a layer of white-chocolate-peanut-butter fudge and embellished with a chocolate ribbon swirl.

Día de los Muertos, says artist and teacher Martha Ramirez-Oropeza, is a "mestizo celebration," which basically means it's pretty mixed up.

If you think Sacramento's Second Saturday Art Walk has become too busy for its britches, you're not alone.

Michael Himovitz, the debonair gallery owner who died in 1994, fancied Sacramento a cosmopolitan artists colony – not just some sleepy cow town on the road to nowhere, as various people had suggested.

Second Saturday is a phenomenon in Sacramento -- a combination of art galleries, music, dining and street life that has the whole city talking. Here is a guide to this month's Second Saturday art walk.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will become home to one of the world's finest collections of contemporary art, museum officials announced Friday.

The sacred and profane mix in Fred Martin's work at the Art Foundry Gallery and in his essay for the catalog accompanying the show.

When I ask Guy Baldwin of Towani Organic Farm what he likes best about his chili peppers, the Davis Farmers Market vendor starts talking endorphins.

It would be difficult to find two artists more different than John Tarahteeff and Brian Tripp, yet each intrigues us with symbolic works whose sources are mysterious.

Aside from his street- inspired gallery art and commercial murals, Shane Grammer designs and builds installations for churches and retailers around the country.

In honor of the late art gallery owner and Second Saturday co-founder Michael Himovitz, who died 15 years ago of complications from HIV/AIDS, several galleries will set up donation boxes for CARES (the Center for AIDS Research, Education and Services) as part of this week's Second Saturday.

Like Picasso's paintings and Einstein's theory of relativity, the brassiere – invented in 1907 – is a product of the early 20th century.

They painted what they saw along Franklin Boulevard. For David Peterson, it was a vintage gas station reborn as a muffler shop. Patris Miller depicted shadows falling across a residential street. And Karen Dukes captured a broken-down "drive-thru" sign at a busy intersection.

A chat with Sacramento artist Tony Natsoulas, whose sculpture "Lee Counts His Snails Under the Bohdi Tree" won best of show in the fine art competition at this year's California State Fair.

Never have I had such a hard time narrowing down my choices of shows, artists and events to look forward to during the fall art season.

It's been called the most important collection of Northern California art in the world. The Napa Valley wildlife preserve where it is housed has been described as a kind of counterculture Hearst Castle.

The corn dogs will never be fresher or the art better than at the 2009 California State Fair.

Each week, Spotlight will focus on something – props, lighting, sound, costumes, etc. – that's essential to an arts or feature presentation.

"Live Large" is the title of Colleen Maloney's show at the Davis Art Center – and that phrase aptly suggests the scale and ambition of Maloney's recent oil paintings, which tend toward the monumental.

When she was young, Kyo Tsuji visited a ceramics workshop and was rebuked for trying to touch the potter's wheel because in Japan women were considered "impure."

The vice chairwoman of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission won't say what she meant by referring to Mayor Kevin Johnson's "behavior and actions" as reasons why she quit.

Second Saturday is a phenomenon in Sacramento -- a combination of art galleries, music, dining and street life that has the whole city talking.

Axis Gallery, the nonprofit space next to the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, is a little gallery that thinks big.

Since the early 1950s, Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum has been in possession of five works by Martin Ramirez – a self-taught artist who spent much of his adult life in the former Dewitt State Hospital in Auburn, diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

Ricardo Rivera has no formal scientific background, yet his show at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, draws on science to explore the enigmas of anamorphic drawing and Einsteinian black holes.

How could you resist a show titled "Fresh Young Things"? The young things in question are not baby green beans but artists fresh out of graduate school.

Back in Sacramento after a 1 1/2-year stay in China, Jian Wang proudly introduced this writer to his new series of paintings, "Beijing Girls," on a walk-through of the exhibit at Solomon Dubnick Gallery in midtown.

Summer seems especially suited to shows of landscape painting, which is why Elliott Fouts Gallery is hosting its sixth annual look at our natural environs.

Picasso, Bonnard and Matisse are among the ranks of great artists who loved to paint cats.

Friends of a local wire sculpture artist who is fighting leukemia have organized an event to raise money for his medical and living expenses.

Maxfield Parrish's "Daybreak" summed up the popular taste of 1920s America. The winsome image of an androgynous nude bending over an awakening girl in front of a classical Greek landscape was the ultimate emblem of youth, innocence and pleasure during the Jazz Age.

If the shiny black helmet of a Japanese suit of armor makes you think of Darth Vader, you are right. Made of leather, the armor is part of a show devoted to samurai culture at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

For now, the local arts community is taking a hopeful wait-and-see approach on Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson's commitment to the arts.

Second Saturday is a phenomenon in Sacramento -- a combination of art galleries, music, dining and street life that has the whole city talking. Here is a guide to this month's Second Saturday art walk.

If you've taken a walk through midtown lately, chances are good that you've unwittingly stepped on a piece of art.

In the latest exhibit at Sacramento's Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Barbara Spring and Annie Murphy-Robinson offer works that are filled with emotion but thankfully leave sentimentality behind.

Sacramento's largest art gallery is not just in the city, it is the city and surrounding Sacramento County.

David Kuraoka and his circle are the focus of a well-crafted ceramics show, "Firing a Legacy: David Kuraoka and San Francisco State University," running through June 1 at the Pence Gallery in Davis.

Back in February, we noted collectible outsider artist Martin Ramirez -- who was having a show in New York -- spent years in Auburn's DeWitt Center, then a state hospital. As a result, we speculated that there could be more of his work out here.

Diagnosed as schizophrenic, Martin Ramirez ended up institutionalized in 1948 in Auburn's then-DeWitt State Hospital. There he would spend the rest of his days. He never saw his wife and four children again, never returned to work the Mexican rancho he loved. Instead, Ramirez did what mental patients often did: He created art. And he did so obsessively.