Culture

Bay Area arts: 10 cool shows and concerts to catch this week


From a star-studded gospel tour to a scrap-art exhibit and plays about board games and dragon ladies, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Area this weekend and beyond.

Here is a partial roundup.

Gospel music greats unite

The gospel music Reunion Tour that’s headed to Oakland Arena this weekend features a musical A-list of talent, including Yolanda Adams, who has one of the finest voices in all of gospel music.

She’s put it to great use during her career, fashioning a body of work that has thrilled  listeners and sold more than 10 million albums across the globe. Adams also won the first-ever Grammy award for best gospel song in 2006 for “Be Blessed” and hit platinum-plus status with 1999’s “Mountain High… Valley Low.”

Adams is just one of many reasons why gospel fans will want to turn out for Friday’s Reunion Tour. Others include Fred Hammond, the Clark Sisters, Marvin Sapp and Kirk Franklin, who is once again leading this tour. The latter is a gospel music icon with a staggering 19 Grammys to his credit. Sapp has released a string of No. 1 gospel albums, including 2007’s “Thirsty” and 2012’s “I Win.” Hammond is known for his 2009 chart-topper, “Love Unstoppable.” And then there are the Clark Sisters, the legendary vocal group with hits such as “I Can Do All Things Through Christ That Strengthens Me” and “Jesus Is a Love Song.”

Details: Showtime is 7 p.m. and tickets start at $53, theoaklandarena.com.

— Jim Harrington, Staff

From scrap to art

Plastic bags, perfume-bottle straws and shoelaces – these are not things you’d commonly associate with high art. But why not? Many hallowed artists in the modern canon use lowbrow materials for their inspiration, from Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s sculptures of household rubbish and taxidermied animals to Charles Long’s cigarette butts and bird poop salvaged from the L.A. River.

“The Poetics of Dimensions,” a new group exhibition in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, celebrates the clever reuse of such ordinary objects. Put on by Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, the show gathers nearly a dozen artists working with materials like scrap leather, cosmetics containers and single-use plastic. Anthony Akinbola, a Brooklyn artist who’s exhibited at the Guggenheim, weaves colorfully abstract tapestries out of durags, the inexpensive hair covering. Moffat Takadiwa, who lives in Zimbabwe, sources the post-consumer waste that Western countries dump in his country’s junkyards to make intricate sculptures out of toothpaste tubes, computer keyboards and spray cans. You might just walk away from this one with a new hesitation about hucking things in the trash.

Details: The show runs Wednesday-Sunday through Feb. 23, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 345 Montgomery St., San Francisco. Free admission; icasf.org.

— John Metcalfe, Staff

Return of the Dragon Lady

After a successful and well-received run at Marin Theatre last year, the Dragon Lady is poised to entertain Bay Area audiences anew with her colorful, humorous and sometimes poignant solo theater/cabaret show. The Dragon Lady is Sara Porkalob, a Seattle-based singer, actor, …read more

Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment

      

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