Art never sleeps, even during the summer when most of us are kicking back and swinging in our hammocks. Time has come to put aside that refreshing pitcher of Tom Collins, get out of the house, and imbibe some culture. Here are a few suggestions on where to go.
Rena Bransten Gallery: Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Love & War. Ferlinghetti, an activist, poet, co-founder of City Lights Booksellers and all-round local legend, has been a familiar fixture on the literary scene for years, and can still draw a crowd. Though poetry has been his claim to fame, unbeknownst to many he has pursued his second love, painting, for more than six decades. In his latest solo exhibition, the 97-year-old, self-taught artist brings a long life well-lived and his exposure to the atrocities of WWII, which turned him toward "radical pacifism," to reflections on the ties that bind and the conflict that tears them apart. Bodies of water, avian life, the human figure and text scrawled on canvases are recurring motifs and, as one might expect, literary references abound: side-by-side images of T.S. Eliot's wife Vivienne on the eve of her marriage and 20-odd years later upon her commitment to an insane asylum; Beckett's Godot; a mournful Edna St. Vincent Millay, her eyes downcast, words covering a portion of her face; and "The Howl" (2002/13), invoking both Edvard Munch's disturbing lithograph "The Scream" and the Allen Ginsberg opus published by Ferlinghetti in 1956, an act that led to his arrest and a highly publicized obscenity trial. An almost boyish, minimalist technique is applied to serious, politically charged subjects. In "Boat People" (2006), for example, a small green craft with mast and no sail is tossed by rough, bleak seas, carrying its passengers �" one of them blindfolded, another gagged �" on a perilous passage; and two ghoulish antagonists, naked except for their helmets, face off in the grotesque "C'est la Guerre" (1982). Through Aug. 20; renabranstengallery.com.
Vessel Gallery: Disruptus, a group exhibition of painting, poetry, sculpture and photography, which takes its title in part from Silicon Valley tech-speak, explores timely topics to consider in this tumultuous election season: the unsettling impact of technology, globalization and political upheaval on our daily lives. Fast-changing communities like Oakland, where this gallery and many priced-out SF transplants are located, have borne some of the brunt of these forces, though they're felt around the world in places like Russia, for instance, the native country of those irrepressible feminist/punk rockers Pussy Riot, who've provoked the iron hand and punitive wrath of Putin's government. Their rebel spirit is captured at full tilt in a colorful collaborative work by Christa Assad and Kevin Wickham. It's displayed along with the team's giant pink grenade sculpture ("Disruptor"), which could be mistaken for a toy, a devilish play on the concept of war games. Sculptor Todd Laby's morphing installation "Migration," a cluster of wooden houses built on unstable ground, grapples with displacement head-on, and David Burke's acrylic-and-ink painting "What's Yours Is Mined," informed by animation and a steampunk aesthetic, addresses the clash between protecting the fragile environment and ruthless industrial imperatives. Through Aug. 27; vessel-gallery.com.
SOMArts Cultural Center: Women, generally speaking, get less exhibition space than their male counterparts, and artworks by black women are shamefully underrepresented in most galleries and museums. Ergo The Black Woman Is God, a mix of performance and visual art projects exclusively focusing on the roles of black women and their impressive, often overlooked contributions as artists, feminists and change-agents. This expansive show includes 60 black female artists who work at the intersection of race and gender, expressing their personal perspectives in a range of mediums and styles. Joan Tarika Lewis created "The New Seal of California," a re-imagined state emblem with a tribal black woman as its central figure; and curator Karen Seneferu screens her African-inflected art video Hotcomb: The Masquerade. Shot by Idris Hassan largely in Oakland, and featuring local dancers and performers, it depicts the return of spiritual ancestors who visit various historical sites inside and outside the Bay Area black community in an attempt to heal old wounds. Through Aug. 17; somarts.org.
Haines Gallery: The Stand-Ins features works by a quartet of artists �" Kota Ezawa, Maurizio Anzeri, Chris McCaw and Allison Smith �" who enlist digital and photographic images as surrogates for real people, places and things. Never failing to intrigue, Ezawa, who splits his time between Berlin and San Francisco, has set his sights this time out on the notorious 1990 grand theft from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in which a pair of thieves, disguised as police officers, stole 13 works of art valued at upwards of $500 million. Those works haven't been recovered, but now, two of them, Manet's "Chez Tortoni" and "The Concert" by Vermeer, have been transmuted in Ezawa's distinctive style and resurrected as custom-designed light boxes whose scale mimics the vanished originals. Through Sept. 3; hainesgallery.com.