Spark

Crafted from recycled materials, Ma Li’s dream-like sculptures celebrate individual freedom, imagination and play. In Ma Li’s hands, clear plastic bottles transform into suspended fields of jellyfish-like sculptures, and colored foam and clothes hangers resemble migrating flocks of birds. With references to Chinese history, ecological concerns, ritual and fantasy, the Bay Area-based visual and performance artist weaves unlikely materials into large-scale immersive environments, and brings them to life with choreographed movements.

Painter, graphic designer, illustrator, sculptor and stereo photographer Rene Garcia Jr. has been re-imagining popular art in many different ways, but it's his large format sculptural glitter paintings that have gotten the most attention recently. Reproducing such things as retro ads and celebrity photos in glitter, Garcia's photorealistic pieces can take over 100 hours to complete. Spark visits him in his dazzling studio that any grade school class would envy.

Passion for the art of dance is perhaps the defining quality of Oakland's Ronn Guidi, director of the Oakland Ballet Academy and founder of the famous Oakland Ballet. An ever-energetic mainstay of the East Bay dance scene, Guidi created the Oakland Ballet in 1965 and led the small regional company to international attention in the 1970s with his canny choices of repertoire. After 33 years at the helm of the Oakland Ballet, Guidi retired from the company in 1998, to be succeeded by Karen Brown, who directed the company until 2005, when it was forced to close its doors after its 40th anniversary season. Spark follows Guidi's revival of the company he founded and its return to the stage with a triumphant performance of his own "Nutcracker" in 2006.

Meet San Francisco political cartoonist Mark Fiore, who quit his job at a daily newspaper to experiment with a new format -- animated political cartoons for the web.

San Francisco writer, performer and playwright Dan Hoyle set off in a Ford E-150 conversion van on a three-month-long summer journey into America's heartland to discover just what -- and who -- lies between the liberal-leaning cultures of the East and West coasts. Hoyle, a Fulbright scholar and son of well-known Bay Area circus performer Geoff Hoyle, shares with Spark what he found during his rambling adventure across some 20 states. Hoyle's travels through countless small towns and the people he met along the way inspired the solo show Real Americans, a humorous and thought-provoking window into American lives lived far outside the big city.

See how Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Fiore finds his inspiration for his weekly political online animation.

The Fisher Collection of Contemporary Art is widely considered to be one of the most impressive private art collections in the world. Beginning in June 2010, a preview entitled Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection debuts in a major exhibition during a three-month presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Calder to Warhol is culled from the more than 1,100 works collected over four decades by Doris and the late Donald Fisher, founders of Gap.

Art figures into the work scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer creates at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in more ways than one. Commissioned by the San Francisco museum to write the Torah, Judaism's sacred text, from beginning to end using scribal techniques and traditions passed down for thousands of years, Seltzer must follow strict rules governing the document's production. And she faces the added challenge of completing the lengthy spiritual practice in plain view of museum visitors observing her progress. Seltzer's work is as potentially controversial as it is methodic and meditative. Performing an act long reserved for men, Seltzer is producing a text that many conservative Jewish communities will not consider Kosher or suitable for religious use. Ultimately, the Torah she completes will be given to a Jewish congregation that is accepting of its origins.

In this segment, we follow choreographer Jacinta Vlach and saxophonist Howard Wiley as they start work on a new dance theater production about San Francisco's Fillmore District. "The Fillmore Project" is a tribute to the cultural legacy of the neighborhood once known as "The Harlem of the West."

Sorting out the complexities of racism in 60 minutes might seem an impossible proposition, but that's exactly the challenge San Francisco comedian W. Kamau Bell undertakes in his one-man show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. Spark visits Bell to discuss race and check out his show.

Spark visits Richard Mayhew at his home studio outside Santa Cruz, California, in 2009. During this time, his work is appearing concurrently at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the de Saisset Museum of Santa Clara as part of a three-part retrospective tracing his career chronologically from the 1950s onward. His work is featured in the permanent collections of such museums as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum, among others.

Although Marin landscape artist Daniel McCormick often exhibits his works of earth art in galleries, the natural place for his organic sculptures is in the wild, where the graceful forms find a home clinging to the edges of creek banks and gullies, gradually subsuming themselves into the existing environment. Spark follows McCormick as he works on an installation in the John West Fork of Olema Creek, in Marin -- a prime spawning ground for endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout.

Decidedly unsilent, the San Francisco Mime Troupe's gadfly theater, played for free in city parks and spaces, has long defined a distinctly San Francisco brand of experimental theater. Spark talks with actors Ed Holmes, Michael Sullivan, and Velina Brown in Dolores Park as the San Francisco Mime Troupe gets ready for a 2009 performance of "Too Big to Fail" during their 50th anniversary season.

In an age of lightning-fast and celebrity-obsessed media, a time when a single subject can be photographed and transmitted around the world in mere moments, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado stands out. Not only does the celebrated documentary photographer eschew commercial subjects for socially charged images of humans and landscapes shaped by socioeconomic and environmental injustice, but also he routinely devotes years to his projects, which often comprise hundreds of black-and-white images.

Instead of glamorous hotspots, famous faces and iconic structures, Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout prefers just the opposite. Rather than the latest and greatest venues du jour and the throngs that flock to them, Westerhout has built a career on creating large-scale images which capture the empty places long since forgotten by the general public -- including abandoned hospitals, churches, and theaters. "I've been photographing in abandoned buildings for about 12 years now, and what I am so drawn to is the way the light enters these buildings and the way it carries color, from the outside, depending on the time of day," Westerhout explains to Spark during a photo shoot at the train depot at 16th and Wood streets in West Oakland.

For more than 20 years, the Jewish Music Festival has brought eclectic music from every corner of the Jewish diaspora to Bay Area audiences. For their 23rd annual event, festival director Ellie Shapiro has commissioned nine artists from Israel, Ukraine, New York, New Orleans and the Bay Area to create groundbreaking new Jewish music -- and they only have six days to do it. While the festival is underway, the musicians hole up in the basement of a divinity school in the Berkeley hills. On the seventh day, The Ark artists premiere the work at the closing night on the 2008 Jewish Music Festival. Spark gets an insider's look at the process.

The free-spirited passion of neo-Romanticism remains alive at Mary Sano's Studio of Duncan Dancing, where Sano passes on the work and teaching of the great early-20th-century modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Spark follows Sano as her company prepares for its 10th-anniversary performances and as she passes on the legacy of Isadora Duncan to a new generation of dancers.

Master ceramicist and singer-songwriter Ron Nagle claims to have little patience. But to anyone familiar with the painstakingly rendered, diminutive forms he has become best known for over the last three decades, impatience seems an unlikely quality to ascribe the San Francisco artist. As Spark catches up with him, Nagle is hard at work on his first new album in 30 years, with songwriting partner Scott Mathews.

Transgender performer Sean Dorsey brings stories of his own struggles with gender and sexuality to the stage, making them accessible to a wider audience. Spark visits with Dorsey while he works on "Lost/Found." For this work, Dorsey uses journal entries, memoirs and letters culled from the trans and queer community to piece together a narrative in which he fantasizes about the normal childhood he might have had if he was born a boy

Pianist Rebeca Mauleón grew up in San Francisco listening to Carlos Santana. When she started playing professionally in her early twenties, Mauleón performed and recorded with some of the luminaries of Latin and jazz including Tito Puente, Israel "Cachao" Lopez, even Santana himself. Today, she's a prolific player, composer, and arranger, but she does more than create music. Mauleón is a musicologist and author, having written several texts on Latin music technique, including the Salsa Guidebook. Spark catches up with Mauleón as she switches hats, more than once -- composing Latin music for software companies, teaching Caribbean music traditions at City College of San Francisco, and leading her own ensemble on stage and off.

Spark follows the Hijos del Sol crew as they finish up a mural for a group called Healthy Start, which provides social services to immigrant families in East Salinas. The mural is full of vibrant colors and symbolic images. The focus is on the family and the most striking image is of a mother letting her child go so that he may soar over the fields of strawberries. Like many immigrant children, Jose Ortiz had trouble adjusting to living in new country when his family moved the United States from Mexico when he was 11 years old. His awakening happened when a teacher noticed his artistic talents and encouraged him to start working on canvas. However, it wasn't until Ortiz was in college that he took meaningful art classes. Now a successful artist, Ortiz decided that other kids who needed a place to learn about art shouldn't have wait as long as he did. So in 1992 he started Hijos del Sol, an after school program in East Salinas focusing on murals helping keep youth off the streets. All are welcome at Hijos del Sol but most of the participating youth are immigrants due to the fact that Salinas is a farming town, where migrant workers and their families have settled.

Fletcher Benton moved from a small town in Ohio to San Francisco in the late 1950s to pursue his dream of becoming a painter, yet found success as a sculptor. In the 1960s he began experimenting with kinetic sculpture, or art that moves. It was the golden age of kinetic art, and Benton's colorful sculptures made of metal and plastic won him accolades from the art world. Spark visits Benton in his sculpture studio, and at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara during their exhibits "Flashing Back" and "Eye on the Sixties," which feature an eclectic mix of paintings, drawings, and sculptures made in the 1960s.

A dirty kitchen, a motionless man watching a flock of birds taking flight, a woman disappearing around the corner of a motel building -- these are the kinds of seemingly mundane scenes photographer Henry Wessel has been capturing since the 1960s. But under his careful hand and watchful eye, these scenes are transformed into unique and unforgettable images of life in the American West, and in California in particular, that led the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to launch a major retrospective of Wessel's work in 2007

Ann Hamilton's eight-story tower, built on the grounds of the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, Calif., is more than just a work of art to be observed. With its cylindrical walls, staggered windows, open ceiling and winding stairways, the space also serves as a unique venue for performance art. Spark visits with Hamilton and Meredith Monk for the unveiling of "The Tower."

With a body of work noted for its pulsing athleticism and intelligent composition, Benjamin Levy has become one of the Bay Area's most sought-after choreographers, creating a style marked by personal inspiration distilled into pure movement. In his 2007 work tentatively called "Bone Lines," Levy translates into dance the story of his own family, Persian Jewish immigrants who fled Iran during the religious revolution of the 1970s. Levy brings Spark inside the process of creating this piece premiering at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco. For this production, he collaborates with his five-member troupe along with designers Colleen Quen and Rick Lee and composer Keeril Makan, whose original score will be recorded by the Kronos Quartet.

Cultures collide in the work of Julio Cesar Morales, an artist offering hisinterpretation of a post-apocalyptic city based on his experiences growingup on the border of California and Mexico. Morales's exhibit "There's Gonna Be Sorrow" was also influenced by the first album he ever purchased, David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs." Bowie's album, which was influenced by George Orwell's dystopian novel, "1984." Spark catches up with Morales to chat about his installation at Galería de la Raza.

From Uzbekistan to India, Turkey to Afghanistan, the Ballet Afsaneh Art and Culture Society brings to the stage the vibrant sights and sounds of the ancient route through Asia known as the Silk Road. Spark sits in as they rehearse Sharlyn Sawyer's "Song of Generations," a multi-generational collaboration with the Nejad World Music Daf Ensemble that celebrates Persian culture and history.

When Shotgun Players was looking for a playwright from the Bay Area to write a play about South Berkeley, it was Marcus Gardley who got the gig. The result being "Love is a Dream House in Lorin," which was community theater in the truest of senses -- the cast of 30 people ranged in age from 9 to 69, consisted of professional actors and residents of the neighborhood. Although Gardley lives in New York, he continues to work on projects about the Bay Area community. Spark catches up with the poet and playwright as he works on "Love Song for the Night in Gail."

Living in an age of information overload, Scott Kildall sees a cultural shift moving towards a media information economy. He also perceives the artist as a gatherer, so to create an original media object, Kildall often repurposes materials to give them a whole new meaning. Spark accompanies Kildall as he works on his ongoing video project called "Something to Remind Me." Being a multi-media artist, Kidall's talents include welding, editing video, programming microcontrollers, building electronics and developing controlled pyrotechnic systems. He earned a B.A. in political philosophy from Brown University and an M.F.A. in art and technology studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited around the world.

"When I do a project, I never know where it's going to lead me. It all has to do with what kind of junk I'll find," Amiot tells Spark as he goes to work on a sculpture for Sebastopol's annual Apple Blossom Parade.

June Schwarcz did not set out to become a legend. In fact, the enamel artist first encountered the medium for which she would become famous on a lark. She was introduced to it by some friends who were taking enameling classes at the Denver Art Museum in 1954.

A once-empty space in a downtown parking garage shows the work of 60 local artists and holds a monthly reception for featured artists during the city's ongoing South First Fridays Gallery Walk. This provides artists in and around San Jose with an opportunity to exhibit and sell their work close to home. Spark visits with two of these artists while they prepare for an exhibit at Kaleid.

After 25 years of running Berkeley Ballet Theater, there is no sign of Sally Streets slowing down. Five days a week, you can find the Oakland native teaching and testing her newest choreography on her students. Acting as co-founder, director, choreographer and teacher, Sally Streets aims at making her dances fun so that her students don't realize all of the hard work that is going into it. One of her favorite groups to teach is advanced teenagers because they are so eager to learn. Spark catches up with Streets while she prepares the Berkeley Ballet Theater for their annual spring performance.

As a successful blues man, Mike Henderson has performed widely and released several albums. As a painter, Henderson's work has been exhibited across the country. And as if that weren't impressive enough, he's also an accomplished filmmaker. Spark visits Henderson in his San Leandro home studio as he jams on the guitar and creates a new series of paintings for the Haines Gallery.

Michele Kappel aka Tippy Canoe was a drummer in the rock band The Kirby Grips when she picked up the ukulele and fell in love. She then started writing her own songs for the instrument combining jazz, pop, old time, and girl group music mixed with post-punk influences such as Squeeze and Blondie. After a few years of performing on her own, Kappel formed her own back up band, The Paddlemen with Rick Quisol on drums, Mikie Lee Prasad on guitar and Chris "T.G." Green on bass. Spark catches one of their gigs at Alameda's Speisekammer. - See more at: http://www.kqed.fm/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=17140#sthash.mFQbQH34.dpuf

"The work I make is showing this messed-up system that's perpetuated by the media that makes girls want to conform and buy into this cuteness," Aoki explains when Spark visits her Santa Clara studio while she prepares for a solo exhibition at the LMAN gallery in Los Angeles. And although her message is a bold one, Aoki's use of anime-inspired images and candy colors yields results that are more likely to provoke conversation than arguments.

Despite his sudden rise to international fame, Michael Belmont, aka M dot Strange, advocates that life is simply better with ice cream. His feature-length film "We Are the Strange" is about two outcasts who risk going to the evil city to get ice cream. Among many things, they encounter monster ambushes, giant robot attacks, and explosions. What started as a project in Belmont's bedroom, "We Are the Strange" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 after the movie trailer's overwhelming popularity on YouTube. To show his gratitude, Belmont has been offering a series of tutorials on YouTube to create his particular style of animation, which he's dubbed "Str8nime" -- a fusion of 8-bit videogame culture, Japanese anime, and of course, a healthy dose of strangeness. Spark visits the San Jose filmmaker and his cast of characters.

Since its founding in 2001, the San Francisco-based Janice Garrett & Dancers has rapidly become one of the most respected small modern dance troupes in the Bay Area. Garrett's choreography is notable as much for its craftsmanship as for its dazzling speed, musical clarity and wit. Spark follows Garrett and her dancers on the road to their sixth San Francisco season and reveals why all the hard work and sacrifices are worth it.

Choreographer Jess Curtis founded Jess Curtis/Gravity in 2000. He's had a hand in creating bodies of work with companies such as San Francisco's Contraband and the Franco-American Circus project Cie Cahin Caha, Cirque Batard. Along the way he has been commissioned to make works across Europe and has won numerous awards. Spark visits with Curtis as he premieres a work called "Under the Radar" at San Francisco's counterPULSE. "Under the Radar" is a cabaret piece focusing on the issues of visibility, ability and disability and features an international cast of disabled and non-disabled performers.

Without ponies and parties, textile artist Adela Akers would not be able to produce the intricately woven wall hangings she has become known for over the last decade. She weaves horsehair imported from China and hundreds of recycled metal foil strips made from the tops of wine bottles into her painstakingly detailed pieces. Spark visits Akers in Sonoma County in a converted apple warehouse that she uses as a studio.

ased in San Francisco, the Del Sol String Quartet is asserting itself as a leader in Bay Area new-music performance. This ensemble commissions new music from composers and showcases those and other new works in relevant, responsive and deeply passionate performances. Spark listens to the Del Sol String Quartet rehearse and is there when the quartet debuts the work of three composers -- New Zealand native Jack Body, Iranian-American composer Reza Vali and Los Angeles-based Eric Lindsay.

Dancer Manuelito Biag is the artistic director of SHIFT>>>. Spark visits with Biag as they work on "The Shape of Poison," which was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist teachings of Klesha, the emotional obstacles to enlightenment. The three main Kleshas are passion, ignorance, and anger. The members of SHIFT>>> Physical Theater share an equal involvement in the development of choreography, narrative and structure for each project. Their work is generated out of the performers' own stories and use modern dance to examine the relationships between people in contemporary culture.

Crown Point Press publishes the prints of five or six artists a year who are invited to complete artistic residencies that range from two weeks to six months. For this program, Brown enjoys inviting the participation of established artists in addition to those whose specialty is outside the printing sphere, such as photographer John Chiara. Spark visits with William T. Wiley, one of the leaders of the Bay Area's figurative movement, during his Crown Point Press residency in 2006. The Marin artist guides us through the making of a print, from idea to finished product.

Spark visits with Ikeda in his studio and at a "noborigama" in Napa County, which is a 30-foot wood-burning kiln that is kept burning for seven days straight. Such kilns have been used in Japan since the 17th century. The noborigama's wood-firing technique produces a unique natural ash glaze. Like most ceramicists, Ikeda has developed his own distinctive styles of glazing, formulating personal recipes such as the refined "sei shya," or blue rust, which he uses on his dappled, woven baskets. But it is the philosophy of the age-old ikebana that most clearly informs his work in clay, which can be intricate or simple, highly finished or naturalistic.

Spark visited with Gatti as he explained his intent behind "ONE: An Earth Installation," which ironically happens to be composed without using a single living organism except for a small grouping of cattails. His inspiration for this exhibit came from his reverence for nature and admiration of Native American culture. Although Gatti has spent years building a name for himself within the San Francisco social scene, "ONE" marks his first public exhibition. However, Gatti is no stranger to the public art world either since he served as the president of the San Francisco Art Commission for nine years, starting in 1996.

The upright bass is often viewed primarily as a supporting instrument, but local jazz musician Walter Savage has won a reputation for bringing it to the spotlight. Whether he's playing a gig at a renowned Bay Area jazz institution like Yoshi's or entertaining the masses at Enrico's in North Beach, Savage lets the bass shine through as a leading force.

Founded by Pete Douglas in 1964, the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society is a non-profit organization presenting live concerts of principally jazz, classical and world music.

In a West Oakland lot at 2205 Magnolia, just off West Grand, sculpture artist John Abduljaami lets the wood be his guide. He's there almost every day working from 9am to 5pm. Sometimes he sees a bird. Other times it's a dog, a cowboy on horseback, a rat or a walrus. "Then I start drawing with the chainsaw," Abduljaami tells Spark. A prolific artist who dreams of building a legacy through the wood sculptures he leaves behind, Abduljaami estimates he has produced 500 pieces thus far. If he had his druthers, he would produce a new piece each day. Along with a chainsaw, he uses such tools as an adze, a hammer and a chisel. He often turns to photographs and images of his subjects to guide him while he carves, cuts and shapes the wood before him. While some pieces are delicately rendered birds and jackalopes, others -- like his 2,600-pound walrus complete with wrinkly, cracked skin -- are much larger in scale. Carving the two-ton walrus meant starting with a 3,500-pound chunk of wood that had to be moved with a forklift.

Iranian-born painter, installation and conceptual artist Taraneh Hemami has two homes -- and she also has none. When Hemami came to the United States in 1978 to attend the University of Oregon at Eugene, she had little idea of what the future held. Within a year of her arrival in this country, the Iranian Revolution had changed her homeland forever and prevented her from visiting for more than a decade. Spark follows Hemami as she gathers footage, photographs and stories from a Castro Valley Iranian woman named Nosrat, who is known as "Mommy" and whose life is the cornerstone of Hemami's multimedia display exploring the layers of history and connected stories within a family home. The finished product is an exhibit she titled "Homes," which was displayed at ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge and the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art in August 2006.

Rebar members Matthew Passmore and John Bela wanted to preserve the cultural integrity of the 32-year-old Southern Exposure gallery; not through photographs or a painting, but by drilling out a chunk of the gallery's wall and canning it. Yes, canning it. This may sound a bit strange but their intentions are quite clever. The two got the idea by looking into the history of the gallery. Before SoEx's existence, the building was a can manufactory called the American Can Company. The process of canning the walls was a project created by Rebar, a San Francisco-based arts collective. For Rebar's "Encanment" project, Passmore, Bela and their team clad in work suits, hard hats and goggles drilled 2 ½ inch holes all over the gallery's walls so that they could be processed, condensed, labeled and sold. This took place during Southern Exposure's last exhibit, "Between the Walls," before their move to a temporary new location so the gallery could undergo a seismic retrofit and renovation. Luckily, Spark made it just in time to visit the "encannery" process. For just $20 dollars, one can holds three pieces of 2 1/2 inch of wall immersed in mineral oil, sealed shut and labeled with the words "Best Quality Gallery Space". The money benefits Rebar and Southern Exposure

When Spark caught up with Matmos in the episode "Experimenting," the two were finishing a sound installation for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County show "Sonic Scenery" to correspond with 17 animal dioramas. But in true Matmos fashion, the final product is no ordinary sound display. Instead of playing the music continuously as museum visitors milled about the show, the exhibit required guests to don headphones and personal music players and walk in a counterclockwise direction so they heard the right tracks at the right time.