Middle school art students make colorful mark on the city

When Kathleen Crocetti’s Mission Hill Middle School art students installed mosaics on the Water Street Bridge last year, the City of Santa Cruz helped pay for the art supplies. But this year, when she approached the City with a plan to place 93 mosaics depicting the agricultural products of Santa Cruz County onto the Soquel Avenue Bridge, she learned the chances for funding were slim.

“I wrote to the art commission, a proposal for doing the Soquel bridge, and they said, ‘Yes, yes, we love it, we want to do it—if we have funding,’” says Crocetti. “Well, of course, the redevelopment agency closed and everything is a mess financially in our state. And so I could see the writing on the wall that the City wasn’t going to be able to pay for this, but I’m sort of driven and I really wanted it to happen anyway.”

Tannery Arts Center announces Grand Opening of new art studios complex

In phase two of the Tannery Arts Center’s three-part project, the City of Santa Cruz is close to becoming a model living-working-performing artistic community.

“I call this phase the ‘open the Tannery to the public phase,’” says Rachel Anne Goodman, Tannery Arts Center executive director, about the unveiling of the Tannery’s new Digital Media and Creative Arts Center. More than 70 working artists currently rent space in this 25,000-square-foot art studios complex, where the public can take classes, purchase art, and watch masters at work.

Pat Simmons hits the Blues Fest. In a GT interview, The Doobie Brothers’ guitarist/vocalist waxes nostalgic about Santa Cruz, opens up about the band’s origins and ponders the road ahead.

Who knew that the Santa Cruz Blues Festival, which began in 1993 as a one-day Chicago and Texas blues celebration in Aptos Village Park, would be alive and kicking 20 years later? And who could have predicted that the festival would boast a list of past performers that includes B.B. King, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Joe Cocker, Etta James, Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, Bobby “Blues” Bland and Albert Collins?

Documentary about local nonprofit challenges stereotypes concerning the disabled and surf culture

Special education teacher/videographer Julie Pollack, remembers filming from West Cliff in 2000 as one of her students, Brandon Arthur, went surfing for the first time.

“He was a little guy in a wheelchair, not able to sit up on his own, talk, or really hold himself up in the water,” she says. “His parents told me about this woman who wanted to take him surfing, so I held my breath from the cliff and watched them paddle this little guy out on the water. We all kind of got hooked on it from there because you could tell he was just so thrilled.”

Flamboyant seniors help redefine beauty in Walter Matteson’s documentary ‘Pretty Old’

Walter Matteson was in Copenhagen, Denmark to visit his then-girlfriend (and now wife) when he first saw the photograph that sparked it all. The photo, hanging at the 2007 World Press Photo Exhibit, displayed three senior women in a backstage setting. “I had just seen sports photography and war photography, and I was like, ‘What in the world is that?’” remembers Matteson. “It almost looked something like a David Lynch painting to me; it was a large print—it was giant—that I saw from across the room and it didn’t look real.” The caption was simple: “Ms. Senior Sweetheart Beauty Pageant, Fall River, Massachusetts.”

Gamblers, and ukuleles, and hippies! Oh my! The 11th annual Santa Cruz Film Festival unveils an eclectic round of cinema.

Navigating a film festival is not unlike finding your way through a foreign city for the first time—it’s difficult to know what’s worth checking out. Fortunately, the Santa Cruz Film Festival, now in its 11th year, manages to spread out its  creative offerings enough so that attendees can plan ahead. Diversity is key in this year’s fest—from the opening night film, California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown (May 10) to more eclectic fare, such as EarthVision’s “shorts” program, Active Planet (May 16). Take note of the following 10 films that caught our eye; a fine mix of local and non-local films, narrative and documentary, domestic and international, short- and feature-length works. See you at the movies.

Editor’s note: This week’s Poetry Corner features Martina Evans, an Irish poet and novelist living in London. Evans’ fourth collection, “Facing the Public,” was named a Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement and won the 2011 Piero Ciampi International Poetry Prize. “Petrol,” a verse novel, is set for release by Anvil Press in September 2012.

UCSC alumnus, Bassnectar, looks forward to playing his home away from home

Anyone who listens to pop music today is familiar with wobbly bass lines, wooshing filter sweeps, epic synth melodies and frenetic, stuttering collages of fractured digital noise. Electronic dance music took the Top 40 by storm in 2011, and four months into 2012 it is showing no signs of letting up.

David Herrera Performance Company places mortality under the microscope in ‘Slumber’

When I [die],” David Herrera once said to his mother, “hopefully it will be after your lifetime, but if I do, dance for me.”

Herrera, founder and artistic director of David Herrera Performance Company (DHPCo), believes that death should be celebrated, or at least not marked by dreary funerals and somber months of mourning.

National Dance Week hits its stride in year five
Special: Dance Week schedule and list of Free dance classes

Dance, dance … otherwise we are lost,” said the late Pina Bausch, the German dancer/choreographer who was honored last year in Wim Wenders’ performance documentary, Pina. With that advice in mind, you may want to consider an exciting (not to mention free) opportunity to find yourself, as it were.

From April 19-27, National Dance Week Santa Cruz continues its annual custom of showcasing the best of the local dance scene, which covers an impressively diverse range of forms and styles. With the participation of numerous dance studios and instructors, as well as hundreds of performers, the event offers accessible performances, public exhibitions, and free classes.