There’s still a little bit of time to catch photographer Larisa Shaterian’s exhibit at Berkeley’s Photolab Gallery - but not much.

“Introductions: Portraits of Palestinians from the Nablus and Jenin Regions,” a series of silver gelatin prints, stems from a project the third year New York University student recently began with journalism student Mohammed Farraj. Their goal is to introduce viewers to Palestinians through images and words.

Here’s an image from the show:

“Um Ahmed, 2008″

I’ve been meaning to catch this show for some time as I’m really drawn to portraiture and black & white photography. Better get there soon…it closes July 12.

Visit 9 a.m.-6 p.m. through Friday, 10:30 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday. 510-644-1400, www.photolaboratory.com.

American artist Robert Rauschenberg died Monday according to an AP report and  New York’s Pace Wildenstein gallery.

Although known for his assemblage and mixed media works which brought together elements as disparate as bald eagles, mattresses and brooms, the Texas native was equally at home in the theater and dance worlds. He designed costumes and sets for Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor.

 I always found Rauschenberg’s funky “combines” - assemblage works he began producing in 1953 at the dawn of the Beat era -especially fascinating. His gift for marrying flotsam and jetsam with scribbles and patches of dripping paint has been hugely influential. He was also an excellent printmaker and his collaged, edgy prints are as vibrant and relevant today as they were in the 1960’s.

 I’m thinking of Rauschenberg’s Automobile tire print, his series of “White Paintings,” the erased De Kooning drawing. If you’ve never seen these works, check them out here, here and here.

Tomorrow, Saturday, March 29, has been designated SWAN Day (Support Women in the Arts Now Day) by The Fund for Women Artists, a San Francisco based non-profit arts organization which aims to help women artists acquire resources for creative work.

30 U.S. states and 10 countries will be hosting SWAN-related events ranging from a documentary film screening in San Francisco to a four-day SWAN Day festival in Berlin and a Celebration of Craftswomen bazaar in India.

You might be pleased to hear that the city of Martinez is joining in on the action with an arts event at the Martinez Opera which is located at 908 Ferry Street.

More than three dozen Contra Costa and Solano County artists will be displaying (and selling) their paintings, jewelry and crafts.

The free event will be held from noon-5 p.m. and all sale proceeds will go directly to the artists.

Visit www.womenarts.org for more information.

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.

This afternoon I visited Diablo Valley College’s Art Gallery’s new show “Places Between: Artists Working with Photography and Sculpture” and I was disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed with the work, quite the opposite. I was sad because the space was too small for such an awesome display of talent recruited for the show.

You see, I have heard of several of the artists in the show namely Liz Hickok, Therese Lahaie and Ehren Tool. You probably have, too, even if you don’t know their names.

Liz Hickok once built a model of San Francisco using Jell-O . She has some landscape photographs of this amazing fete on display at the gallery now.

Therese Lahaie’s kenetic sculptures were a bright spot at a show at CSU Sacramento.

Lahaie’s signature kenitic work is on display at the DVC gallery as is some of her photographic work.

And Ehren Tool’s work at the 2003 Burning Man event was one of the largest installations folks who regularly attend the event have ever seen.

Combine these three artists with five more in a 1,000-square-foot gallery space and you get just a little, bitty taste of what they have to offer. It is simply not enough.

Vanitas, 2007 by Rian Kerrane

According to the gallery, Rian Kerrane creates personal landscapes using sculpture and imagery and the artist hopes the viewer will have a multi-sensory experience when they see the work. One wall of the gallery was completely taken over by Kerrane’s “Vanitas” made of pinhole photographs, florist wire, lace, Velcro and motorized fans. I could have spent hours looking at all the tiny photographs.

1 CBU 87 over DVC, 2007 by Ehren Tool

Tool’s piece “1 CBU 87 over DVC” could perhaps be described as war porn. It is made of more than 200 ceramic cups with pictures of weapons, naked ladies, George W. Bush and famous quotes on them. Tool is a Gulf War veteran and he does his work to get you to think about war. I did do just that and greedy little me also thought about the gallery’s press release, which says Tool will be giving away his cups after the show. I want one.

A Sea of Troubles Meets the Trees Themselves by Melissa Borman

Just around the corner from Tool’s piece was Melissa Borman’s installation, which, compared to the war-theme Tool, was rather reflective and simple. Small branches of a tree were hanging from the ceiling and resting inside manilla envelopes. The envelopes had thoughtful phrases on them and I read each one. I felt happy and calm within her installation.

“Places Between: Artists Working with Photography and Sculpture” will be up until Feb. 23. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check the gallery Web site to figure out how to find it on campus (it’s easy!). Bring $2 in quarters to get a parking permit for the day.

I always go the the White Elephant Sale, a benefit for the Oakland Museum of California. The preview sale, happening Sunday, is a hoot if you like battling rabid crowds for second-hand goods and collectibles.

My friend Polly of the Sometime Gallery just has this knack for sorting through the detritus of artists and art lovers, picking just the right painting or photograph for her hip home collection in the sale’s art corner. I don’t know how she does it. She can find, say, a rudimentary painting of a horse done on wood then bring it home and it looks like something out of a real gallery.

This annual sale is perhaps the biggest rummage sale in the country. It is organized Oakland Museum Women’s Board, a nice group of older women who work hours upon hours in a cold Fruitvale warehouse sorting other people’s junk and turning it into treasured goods.

There are millions of things to buy at the sale, from old linens to old suitcases. And if you are into collecting kitschy art or faded photos of people from the 70s that you have no relation to, this is the place for you. Who knows, perhaps you will find a Picasso under that black velvet painting of Mickey Mouse you got for three bucks.

The preview sale begins at 11 a.m., but I’d get there earlier than that if I wanted to get my hands on the best pieces at the sale. Tickets to the sale are $12.50 in advance if you buy them at the museum or $15 at the door.

The “regular sale,” which is free, is held March 1 and 2. There are still some great buys during free days.   

Sale organizers are asking everyone to be “green” this year and ride BART to Fruitvale BART station for the sale, or park in the Fruitvale BART parking lot. Shuttles will take shoppers to the White Elephant Sale warehouse at 333 Lancaster St. throughout the day. The shuttle will also be available March 1 and 2.

Rosin Coven, the band who created the Annual Edwardian Ball

The 8th Annual Edwardian Ball, a celebration of Edward Gorey and all things dark and delightful, is sold out Saturday night. But you can still enjoy the event both Friday and Sunday with other fun offerings during the Edwardian Ball Weekend.

While at last weekend’s fashion show at The Crucible, I ran into artist and arts promoter Will B. Chase, who is curating Friday night’s Edwardian World’s Faire. I was telling him how bummed I was that I didn’t get tickets to the ball and, sigh, I don’t have a costume anyway. He told me that I should not miss Friday’s event and, he said, he thinks there are still tickets left.

Curious, I looked into a bit more. I am no expert at this stuff but it seems to me all the wonderful, circus-y acts in the San Francisco Bay Area that couldn’t fit on the bill during Saturday’s ball are performing or at least showing their work sometime Friday or Sunday. On Friday, that includes the fun City Circus and the San Francisco quartet Rube Waddell. Paxton Gate, a beautifully odd store on San Francisco’s Valencia Street, will also be there as will the city’s prime corset-maker Dark Garden.

I saw one of Sunday’s featured acts, Eric McFadden, at the “Dark Cabaret” a couple of years ago. I think that’s the moment I realized I really enjoy McFadden’s style of creepy, brooding carnival music.

Anyway, if you missed getting tickets to the main ball, I am sure you will not be disappointed by Friday or Sunday’s not-yet-sold-out shows at the Great American Music Hall. Tickets are $20 Friday night and $18 Sunday. Buy ‘em here.

The sounds of sawing and pounding, like the kinds currently going on in the newsroom, don’t remind me of construction sites, oddly enough, as much as they do artist’s studios.

Or so I’m trying to convince myself.

I’ve been fortunate to have peeked into a number of studios while writing for this paper. The variety of places where artists work out of never ceases to amaze me.

I’ve seen paint-splattered easels splayed open in garages and pottery studios (wheels and kilns) in former 1920’s-era cardhouses.

One artist creates what look like sea-born vessels in a home workshop. Another — a metal artist — rents out a huge warehouse in Emeryville’s industrial neighborhood.

I’ve observed muralists living and working out of converted storefronts in downtown Pittsburg and digital artists working out of spare bedrooms. The sheer inventiveness of where an artist finds space to create is pretty mind-boggling.

And I’ve seen the neatest things there too…newspaper clippings, sketches, snapshots, works-in-progress, finished pieces, scrap material, tools and most importantly, other artist’s work. If there’s one thing artists like to do apart from create, I’ve learned, it’s support each other…and that usually involves displaying someone else’s work.

I recently visited a fascinating studio — filmmaker Les Blank’s “offices” at Flower Films— and saw some amazing work. I learned about Butch Anthony, an Alabama-based Outsider artist whom Blank is documenting and the Maestro, an Albany based artist who’ll I’ll blog about shortly.

In the meantime, I thought I’d post this image of Irish-born painter Francis Bacon’s studio, once a coach house, taken by steve.wilde, off of flickr.com.

After Bacon’s death in 1992, the contents of the studio were moved into a gallery…proof that where an artist works can itself be a work of art.

Ever since my first visit seven years ago, there’s always been a special place in my heart for the grand n’ mysterious Southern state of Louisiana. And I count one of its many artists, writers, musicians and photographers among my favorites: Debbie Fleming Caffery.

Caffery’s luminous black and white gelatin silver prints never cease to amaze me: from photographs of a regal elderly Southern woman hanging onto the last shreds of her fiercely independent existence, to a pair of alligators tangled in a lover’s embrace.

So when I heard that San Francisco’s Robert Koch Gallery was going to be showing Caffery’s gripping yet poetic images taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, alongside photographer Larry Schwarm’s images in a two-person show called “Aftermath” I leapt at the chance to ask the Guggenheim Fellow and renowned photographer about this powerful body of work.

“I arrived in Lafayette, La. the day after Katrina hit Louisiana”, Caffery e-mailed about the origin of the series. “The people and landscape being my source of inspiration throughout my photographic life, I was compelled by a sense of duty as a photographer and of course by my instinct and guts to photograph my state.”

Assigned to the River Center Shelter in Baton Rouge alongside a writer from People magazine to interview the mostly African-American evacuees, Caffery “hesitated” in questioning people because of the sheer rawness of the disaster. “Once we started talking to people, they were very anxious to tell us about their experience. We found that everyone wanted to tell their stories. As they cried, I cried…This was my state and people and I ached for each person.”

Caffery remembers a particularly heartbreaking conversation she had with a child evacuee. “We were talking to a little boy and he told us when asked if he had brought a personal item with him, ‘I brought myself.’” The Saturday after the storm, Caffery joined some ministers and politicians from an African American Louisiana political caucus planning a rescue mission to the New Orleans airport where people were waiting for help. “I can say this was the evening my life changed,” she wrote.

Finding a nightmarish scene (“We could not believe we were in America”) Caffery pressed on to Alexandria and stopped at a shelter “greeted by two white people screaming at the buses (of evacuees) saying, “We don’t want the bus to stop here full of looters and diseased people.” Barred by the police from photographing them, Caffery went to another shelter where “the evacuees were met with gloved men that took all their personal belongings that were damp (fear of contamination) and brought into the shelter for detox showers and given new clothes. The lack of compassion, kindness and sensitivity to the evacuees was astounding…I made a pledge to myself that night that I would go into the neighborhoods of the people I had met and document them and as humanly possible. I would tell the story of what they went through and continuously remind our country that the tragedy in New Orleans was caused by the incompetence of the Federal Government, Corps of Engineers…and the improper evacuation by the city in helping the people that needed the most help.”

Caffery is presently editing and printing her work on both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. She says that she would like to continue photographing as the city “stumbles into recovering.”

“Aftermath” is on display at Robert Koch Gallery, 49 Geary St., 5th Floor, San Francisco, through Jan. 26, 2008. A reception for the artists will be held at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 3, 2008

Jingletown is this interesting warehousey neighborhood in East Oakland between the Interstate 880 freeway and Alameda that is chock full of skilled and fun artists. Plus it has a cool name.

According to the business association, Jingletown got its name from Portugese cannery workers who would walk home from canning fruits from Fruitvale when they got paid and they’d “jingle” their pockets to express their pride in their earnings.

Regardless, if you go to this second-annual event, you’re sure to be impressed by the work of Simone Adair, the mosaics of Kim Larsen and the super mind-bending paintings of Darwin Price.

OH AND LOOKY HERE! I found the woman whose work I bought at the Pro Arts Art Walk. Jill Gibson is participating in the Jingletown Holiday Art Walk and this is the piece I bought from her a couple of years ago that hangs on my mantle!

The Heavens by Jill Gibson

You know that some of this work is affordable if I purchased some!

The Jingletown Holiday Art Walk is from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Dec. 1 and 2. There’s a map on the link to show you how to get there.

See you there!