At the Oakland Art Gallery, nestled between office buildings on a pedestrian walkway off the Frank H. Ogawa plaza in downtown Oakland, nine artists-- some very recent and some semi-recent MFA graduates--are placed together under the visiting curatorial eye of Aimee Chang, of the Orange County Museum of Art, to showcase the pulse of artwork and art-making of the Bay Area. Bay Area Currents 2007, a juried exhibition, shows a fair range of media: sculpture, painting, video and conceptual art. What is initially striking about the chosen artwork overall is the lack of "the figure" as either subject or object.... Read More

Oakland's Bay Area Currents, an annual juried exhibition at the Oakland Art Gallery, is a smaller version of the tepid Bay Area Now juried exhibition that takes place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, showcasing several promising Bay Area emerging artists. Though not aggressively promoted, Bay Area Currents usually hosts noteworthy guest jurors (past including Rosamund Felsen, from Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, and James Elaine, curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum) and draws equally significant diverse artists and new work by resisting any static or packageable themes in the selection process.... Read More