The new signage at the front of the Asian Art Museum is subdued, colorful and beautiful.
On Thursday evening Creative Impact, a newish organization combining professionals from arts nonprofits in the Bay Area along with arts educators, held their third annual networking shindig at Samsung Hall at the museum.
There were harried parents, a few cute costumed kids, earnest educators, government bureaucrats, and arts administrators all thrown into one room which could have been awful but was instead charming.
It was worth attending if only to see Rhodessa Jones in her red hat, posing above with the Bayview singer Martin Luther McCoy.
Part of the pleasure was that the event was a catered affair, with simple but delicious food, and there was also free wine. Quentin Crisp would have been seriously pleased. Plus, you didn't really have to listen to any of the boring speeches from the stage if you kept your voice down. There were plenty of smart, fascinating people to talk with, such as (left to right above) Lucy Lin, Interim Program Director at the SF Arts Commission, Christina Lim who is the Director of Education among many other duties at San Francisco Performances, and Charles McNeal of the San Francisco Ballet.
It was an interesting cross-pollination among people interested in playing creatively with art amongst children.
After the speeches, there was a variety of entertainment, including the talented student-recently-turned-professional tenor Brian Jagde above, singing the famous Act 3 aria from Puccini's Tosca, which he will be performing at the San Francisco Opera in November and December. Having recently decided that I am not going to hear, see or participate in another Tosca ever again, this was close to a cue for exiting.
The most publicly valuable manifestation of this initiative is a wide-ranging web calendar of various arts events that overlap with education, and it is already a fascinating compendium (click here). However, they are featuring my favorite typo in some time, advertising an event at SFMOMA on Saturday the 15th called Cindy Shermal Special Saturday for Teachers. It will be hard to look at any Cindy Sherman signage after this without pronouncing the name as Cindy Shermal and thinking, "they must have changed it at Ellis Island."
4 comments:
When I saw the title come up on my blog buddy list, I had to come over to read it, expecting I might have to send a quiet note correcting a typo.
Never mind. Keep calm and carry on.
Dear Matty: Oh, go ahead and leave a noisy note next time you see a typo here. There's no shame in making one and they are certainly easy enough to fix online. What struck me is that nobody else among all these arts organizations seemed to notice the misspelled name even after CINDY SHERMAN has been plastered all over San Francisco on the sides of buses and posters for the last couple of months because of the SFMOMA show.
I know, typos are common as muck nowadays. If only The Job Creators - blessed be thy names - would throw a few coppers towards some actual copy editors, we might be on the way to full recovery.
Here I was hoping that there was another Cindy other than the ubiquitous Sherman. Rats!
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