.Arts Feature

Award-winning Oakland-born playwright Marcus Gardley never knows where his writing is going. In an interview a week prior to the world premiere of his newest play, A Thousand Ships, Gardley said, “These characters reveal themselves to me...

When Komal Shah was a little girl growing up in India in the home of her textile merchant father, she and her sister did not have a lot of toys. “We used fabric samples to make costumes...

Ghanaian-American playwright and actor Jocelyn Bioh grew up in New York City. Although by no means impoverished, her family didn’t have a lot of money. With Broadway and live theater largely off the table, Bioh says in...

Drago Nesa, entrepreneur, international circus performer and longest-body-burn-while-hanging-from-their-teeth world record holder, teaches aerial silks at SkyHigh Odditorium, a Richmond-based aerial arts and acrobatics school where strength training and choreography fuse in midair. “When you do aerial,” she...

Richmond-based artist Daniel “Attaboy” Seifert is fascinated by transition and transience. Both of these fascinations are expressed in his solo show, “Portal,” on view at San Francisco’s 111 Minna Gallery through December. “If you look up at the...

When Kedrick Armstrong steps up to the podium Oct. 18 at the Paramount Theatre as the Oakland Symphony’s ninth music director, he will be aware of but also liberated by the position’s inherent blessings and burdens. In...

Brian Molyneaux cannot stop taking photographs of strangers. The compulsion took root in an Oakland Whole Foods in 2016. Molyneaux saw someone standing in the store’s floral department with a box cutter, posed with a gravity akin to...