While I am not sure if there is exactly a generational gap here, but for all early users of the internet, born in the latter half of the 1990s, there has been at least one point where we have come across the eponymous “Sandstorm” by Finnish electronic artist, Darude. This man, one of the first big DJs of the...
At the center of the dimly lit theater room at the Culver Center of the Arts sits Jill Alexander Essbaum, bespectacled and sporting a colorful green dress. Essbaum is a noted American poet and novelist whose recent debut novel, “Hausfrau” published in 2015 was a New York Times Bestseller. Her work has been frequently anthologized in publications such as...
You might remember your typical spelling bee competitions from elementary school. You would stand up in front of a microphone, be given a word and then you would have to spell it out and hope you spell it right. Simple, right? Well maybe not for the characters who appear in, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a play...
The California Museum of Photography at the UCR ARTSblock hosted an opening reception for their newest exhibit, “States of Incarceration: A National History of Local Dialogues” last Saturday evening. The exhibit is an interdisciplinary multimedia project that uses historical evidence, scholarly research, crime statistics, music, photographs and the internet to examine the nature of America’s prison systems — with...
Right off Canyon Crest, tucked away in a corner of a small shopping center, across from a bubbling water fountain and a series of lattice gazebos with greenery sprouting all over them sits Cellar Door Books. The placement is almost a little too picturesque — the greenery commingling with the gurgling of the waterfall across from it is almost...
Riverside is known as “the city of arts and innovation,” and at UCR we do a lot to uphold this reputation. From the Culver Center of the Arts in downtown Riverside to the treasures on campus, there’s plenty contributions to artistic culture. One such gem is the small and lesser-known Phyllis Gill Gallery.
John Divola first met Phyllis Gill in...
Famed Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman famously stated, “Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” Maybe that gets a bit melodramatic, but one would be hard-pressed to argue that film, as a medium, does not play a central...
Earlier this week, I sat down with Melanie Queponds, the creative director of the Latino/a Play Project and a fifth-year theater and English double major here at UCR, to discuss the group's mission, history and plans for the future. During our talk, she used a Spanish phrase that caught my attention, “ni de aqui o de aya,” or, “neither...
On Oct. 28, downtown Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center hosted a public print viewing of postmortem photography from the Gluck Foundation’s “From the Vault” series. The modest collection of prints dated back to 19th century daguerreotypes to more modern 20th century colored prints, each frame a fragment of a narrative on the evolution of how we reflect on...
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” — Proverb
Or, as Stephanie Sanchez and Kimberly “Kim” Sanchez put it, one man’s trash allows for their father, Martin Sanchez, to be a highly “organized hoarder.” Kidding aside, anyone passing by the restaurant nestled in downtown Riverside, Tio’s Tacos, can tell the father is no mere hoarder, but an artist who takes...