Oh BOY! I got the chance to tour the new Steinhart Aquarium “Water Planet” exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco today.
I need to preface this post by telling you that I love aquariums. I like to go to the Aquarium of the Bay on my birthday every year (to look at sharks) and I recently visited the zoo and aquarium in Tacoma (to look at sharks) when I visited Washington for vacation.

I like fish. I love sharks, if you hadn’t noticed. And I just fell in love with the fish at the press preview I went to this morning (the sharks are still in holding tanks and not out on display).

Photos by Ralf Burgert

Here I am looking around for piranhas in the tunnel aquarium section of the flooded Amazon display, not totally oblivious of the diver cleaning the glass near me. The Amazon tank has tons of vegetarian piranhas, giant catfish and tiny schooling tetras. And you can see the four-story rainforest at the top of the display.

This guy was in the new California Coast tank, a 100,000 gallon beauty with huge viewing windows. He liked posing for the camera I think.
The fish in this tank are all natives of our coast. I got to see a lot of the stuff we like to eat, too, like scallops and rockfish.

The fish in this tank are not as pretty as the ones you would see in, say, Hawaii, but I like looking at what I might see if I had some special glasses that let me look through the water off Ocean Beach.

When the California Coast exhibits are done they will show all sorts of habitats, from salt marshes to turbulent rocky inlets. There will not only be fish but also birds and invertebrates. You can smell the seawater and watch the filling and draining of tidepools.

After bumping my own nose into the California Coast exhibit, I moved on to the Coral Reef tank.

This tank is the second largest living coral reef display in the world. It holds a massive 212,000 gallons of water! It is also the deepest coral reef tank in the world at 25 feet.

It is full of tropical fish and live coral. Most of the aquatic life is from the Philippines, one of the most diverse reef systems in the world. The result of the Steinhart Aquarium’s workers’ efforts is really a rainbow of color that moves and glides in the clear blue water. In fact, there are more than 2,000 reef fish representing more than 100 species.

Evenutally the whole exhibit will include rays, sea turtle and sharks!

Ralf and I tried to sneak around the rest of the California Academy of Sciences. We got to see the white alligator before we were escorted out of the building. I wish I would have been able to see the penguins but I am sure I will, next time.

The California Academy of Sciences will open Sept. 27. Opening day is free (though I expect a mob scene). From Sept. 28 on, admission is $24.95 for adults, $19.95 for youth ages 12-17, students and seniors over 65, $14.95 for children ages 7-11 and free for children 6 and younger. Buy tickets in advance here.

“Mother-Load,” 2008, mixed media

“It’s made out of sugar!”

That’s the observation I heard most frequently on a recent visit to Australian sculptor Timothy Horn’s exhibit “Bitter Suite” which is currently on display at San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum through October 12 as part of their Collections Connections program.

Indeed it is. The Cinderella carriage and baroque chandelier, two of the pieces in the three piece suite, are covered in shiny chunks of amber-colored rock sugar. But there’s something dark lurking underneath all that candy. Horn is an artist known for blurring the lines between the beautiful and the grotesque.

I recently interviewed the Chimayo, New Mexico-based artist and asked him a few questions about “Bitter Suite” and its enigmatic subject, San Francisco philanthropist and socialite Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.

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This coming Aug. 2 and 3 is a boon for Bank of America customers and art lovers as several Northern California museums will be letting card holders in free.

Dubbed “Museums on Us,” the event is actually happening in 70 museums across the country. Locally, check out Chihuly at the de Young Museum in San Francisco; hear slave narratives at the Museum of the African Diaspora and/ or check out the Bay Area Now 5 exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

If you are a Bank of America customer and are willing to burn some gas, I suggest visiting the San Jose Museum of Art, which is also on the list for free entry that weekend. Their show “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon” is pretty cool as is the rest of their collection. Really, this museum is a gem. Another San Jose institution, the Tech Museum of Innovation (which I have heard mixed reviews of), is also letting bank customers in free.

This is how it works: If you have a Bank of America card you flash it at those participating museums and you get in free. It’s one card per person so maybe this is a good time to hang out with all of your fellow Bank of America friends!

Cool note: This promotion is happening the first weekend of every month until April 2009. So if you plan on going on vacation somewhere in the U.S. on one of those dates and have a BofA card, check to see if you can get in free!

Alameda sculptor Feng Jin e-mailed me to tell me about his show at the Alameda museum, opening this weekend. It is called “Symphony of Chinese Calligraphy and Sculpture.”

Jin has partnered with Taiwanese calligrapher Mei Chu Chang to present this show, open now until July 30.

Chang is an accomplished traditional calligrapher and has even presented some of his work to the Vatican. He breaks from the traditional calligraphic field in this show, presenting a “picto-calligraphy” style that appeals to Western sensibilities.

Jin uses metal sculpture to represent traditional calligraphic characters and other Asian script. Feng Jin even applies the rules and methods of calligraphic writings into metal fabrication, such as correct stroke order, proper balance and rhythm of characters.

I am a big fan of metal sculpture and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a metal piece that is graceful. I meandered through Jin’s Web site and saw enormous amounts of beauty and grace in his work. I can’t wait to see this show!

The Alameda Museum is at 2324 Alameda Ave., right off Park Street.

I spent a relaxing afternoon at Zeitgiest Sunday and ran into Melissa Alexander, the Executive Director of Burning Man’s Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization that helps support the arts in the Bay Area. She told me that the organization, which is responsible for bringing a number of large-scale artworks to San Francisco, is funding a trip of the much-talked-about Homouroboros to San Jose.

The huge piece, done by artist Peter Hudson, was one of the highlights of Burning Man 2007. It consists of 18 life-sized monkeys hanging from curved branches. People can pound on six drums to get the piece moving. Then, using strobes at night or liquid crystal shutter goggles by day, a mind trick called “persistence of vision” causes the monkeys to appear like they are jumping from branch to branch. It is totally amazing.

I have been a fan of Hudson’s work since I saw his swimmers, “Sisyphish” at Burning Man 2001.   

I got a cool surprise when Contra Costa Times Walnut Creek reporter Theresa Harrington wrote about her brother’s work for Burning Man 2007 and her brother happened to be Hudson and the piece happened to be this amazing monkey sculpture.

The Black Rock Arts Foundation hopes to exhibit Homouroboros for one month in conjunction with San Jose’s bi-annual Zero One festival, a festival of technology and art.

Melissa Alexander told me about how the piece will affect the multi-cultural citizens of San Jose. She really wants it to get to San Jose and so do I.

Look for it this spring.

I just wanted to pop in here and remind you that the White Elephant Sale is happening this weekend. I went to the preview sale last month and bought a painting for $10 that has been alternately described as creepy and ugly. I, however, love it. I’ll show you a picture once I get one.

The White Elephant Sale is the largest rummage sale in California and the money goes to the Oakland Museum Women’s Board, which buys art and helps bring exhibitions to the museum.

And it’s a lot of fun.

It’s at the White Elephant Sale Warehouse at 333 Lancaster St., off the Interstate- 880 Freeway/Fruitvale exit near the Oakland Estuary. The sale is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day and they usually discount the remaining stuff on Sunday.

The sale will be offering a shuttle from the Fruitvale BART station. I suggest taking it. It was a real drag last month trying to get my purchases to the car 20 blocks away in the rain.

I had every intention of posting my take on Enrique Chagoya’s “Borderlandia” exhibit a week ago but alas, things didn’t go as planned. I still want to share my thoughts because it’s a great exhibit and not to be missed.

I can’t remember exactly where I first saw Enrique Chagoya’s work. More than likely it was in the book “Friendly Cannibals,” a collaboration between Chagoya and the Mexican-American performance poet Guillermo Gomez-Pena but the specifics aren’t really important. What I do know is that I immediately and viscerally responded to his work.

I was a visual arts student at the time making things like paintings, handmade artists books and silkscreened collages. Looking at Chagoya’s one-of-a kind and limited edition artists books which pay homage to Aztec and Mayan codexes, I found something I could relate to both culturally and visually. His imagery borrowed heavily from sources like comic books, religious iconography, historical woodcuts, vintage magazines and medical textbooks. The techniques lept from bookmaking and printmaking to drawing and painting, all mediums I was interested in.

I was also familiar with some of the subjects his work addressed (colonialism, culture clash, immigration issues, appropriating imagery.) But to me, the ways these issues were presented and explored was something entirely exciting and new.

Nearly a decade later, viewing the work at BAM only enhances the sense of amazement I felt when first looking at Chagoya’s work. There’s beautifully collaged artists books, satirical charcoal drawings and blistering prints. Yes, his subjects come from politics (war, the military, American foreign policy, immigration,) religion, and race relations but it’s the humor he injects into his work that distinguishes him from other artists working in similar genres. I also like his visual vocabulary…the images of Mickey Mouse, Superman, Aztec deities repeated over and over is part of Chagoya’s highly specific visual language. Their meanings are often mutable and change depending on the context. Chagoya’s technical prowess and his ability to move from intaglio printmaking to large oil painting to collage to book art with seeming ease is equally admirable.

And yes, Chagoya’s artwork might not be for everyone. In fact, some people will probably find his work offensive. Chagoya seems O.K. with that. “This is just a drawing,” is the way he responded at a recent artist’s lecture to a question about slack he might receive about his satirical artwork, especially in light of the recent death threats against a Danish artist for his political cartoons. And he’s right. At the end of the day, it is just a drawing, just a painting, just a collage and sure, it might not be something you’d want to place in your house. But it’s vitally important that it exists.

“Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia” runs Wednesdays-Sundays through May 18 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. $5-$8. Free for UC Berkeley students, faculty, staff and children ages 12 and under. 510-642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

I don’t make it to San Jose quite as much as I’d like, considering how many friends I have over there. I also don’t make it to the many museums and galleries downtown as much as I would like to — except for this weekend.

On Superbowl Sunday, I decided to spend the day at the San Jose Museum of Art. The museum is now featuring drawings from Picasso and etchings from Francisco Goya from 1799.

First up was the Picasso exhibit entitled “Etchings of Love and Desire.” The exhibit features 40 of his most amorous drawings, made when he was old and of ill health. I got a little red-faced when I checked out some of the work. The detail was stunning and the work really felt sexual and feminine. I looked around me at some of the folks there. There were tons of people at the exhibit and kids too. What did kids think of Picasso’s rather exact representation of the female anatomy???

I then went on to look at Goya’s work in the exhibition entitled “Dreams of Reason and Madness.” Take a cursory look at the work and it seems a little stiff and boring, like etchings appearing in 1950s history books. Take a closer look at what is really inside of these 80-something etchings and you’ll see the images are actually really powerful.
Done when Goya was stone deaf, the images are mostly dark, thoughtful and give me the sense of being sort of anti-establishment and anti-war. There are prostitutes and dead babies, goblins and goblin-faced generals. I particularly liked one panel of a woman trying to take the teeth out of a man who has been hanged for their supposed power in sorcery. The work is nightmarish and dark…in other words, my cup of tea.

What’s also cool about this exhibit is that you can use the museum’s iPods for free to tour the exhibit. I didn’t use them and I am sort of kicking myself because of it.

My friend and I then headed up to the second floor of the museum where we quickly went through through the exhibition of a graphic artist that didn’t really move us and we ended up inside a showing of the gallery’s permanent collection of contemporary artists. I was surprised to see I recognized many of the names of the artists whose work was on the walls including Hung Liu , who I got to interview last year about her beautiful work with maps and cranes hanging now at the Oakland International Airport.

The Goya and Picasso exhibits will be up until April 20. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults and $5 for students and seniors.

Oh, and by the way, I meant to go to the Anno Domini gallery in downtown San Jose to check out Barron Storey’s “Victims” but it wasn’t open. I’ll have to get to San Jose again soon!

Friday night I went to Chabot Space and Science Center’s Lunar Lounge, an at-one-time monthly event that has now changed to be a quarterly event.

I took my friend Ralf with me, who is a self-professed space nerd, and we enjoyed walking through the exhibits, listening to the Eyewitness News Band rock out in the center’s cafeteria and checking out the center’s updated SonicVision presentation. Let’s not forget there were $3 beers from Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward and yummy food from Askew Grill, one of my favorite local food-on-the-go places (yet not quite “fast food”).

Lunar Lounge is supposed to be a way to enjoy the center as hip adults and teenagers would — with music, food, and funky planetarium shows. I was thrilled to see what could only be called a gaggle of teenage girls enjoying Chabot on a Friday night when they could have been doing other nefarious things their parents don’t want to think about.

But aside from Lunar Lounge revelers, there were other people at the center enjoying themselves. Every Friday night a group of families gather in one of the center’s workshops and polish glass at the Telescope Maker’s Workshop. Ralf and I poked our nosey noses into the workshop and the people there were thrilled to just talk about their weekly hobby, which eventually leads to telescope viewing from their own, hand-made, hard-won telescope.

I started talking to Ralf about the center’s fun Challenger Learning Center experience, which I got to do as part of a press promotional thing. At that very moment, Chabot’s marketing director Sharon Fletcher sat by me and told me about the center’s “Love Mission to Mars,” a Valentine’s Day event where couples can take a simulated space mission to the Red Planet. She says it’s super fun and always sold out, with pairs of lovebirds waiting in the wings hoping another couple drops out. The $80 per-couple price tag includes fizzy beverages, chocolates and a souvenir of the day.

Just when I think I’ve had enough (ENOUGH!) of Chabot, my roommate e-mails me with an event even she couldn’t pass up, a Total Lunar Eclipse Hike at Chabot Feb. 20. I can’t skip that either, so I guess I will be heading to Chabot next month for another stellar event.

Urban by Chuck Todd

Chuck Todd’s new exhibition, “Windows to Wildlife,” at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek just fits perfectly with its setting.

Todd has been working as an illustrator with the Contra Costa Times since 1999 and has illustrated two books with author Gary Bogue: “There’s an Opossum in My Backyard” and “The Raccoon Next Door.”

I am familiar with some of his work at the paper but I haven’t seen these two books before.

The Lindsay Wildlife Museum focuses on native California wildlife and natural history and Todd’s pieces show the wildlife that is in our Bay Area backyards – birds, snakes, hawks and mountain lions — in a simple and beautiful way.

Eagle by Chuck Todd

I was particularly struck by a terribly cute piece about the opossum, featured in the book about opossums. I have seenthese creatures rumbling around in my backyard and I have been frightened and disgusted by them. His cheerful drawing of an opossum doing his rounds in a Bay Area backyard made me think differently of the animals. Perhaps they are just curious, hungry creatures who are just trying to survive like me.

After looking at the show, I had an opportunity to check out just the birds at the museum, which is also home to many other animals. Wow! I have never stared into the eyes of an owl before. Definitely a treat for the kids, should you have some.

The opening reception for “Windows to Wildlife” will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 26 at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, 1931 First Ave, Walnut Creek. The show will be up until April 1. See it during regular museum hours with regular museum admission, $7 for adults, $6 for seniors 65+, $5 for children ages 2 -17, 2 and under free.