Happy Birthday, Fetna Wati! My dear sister-in-law! Happy Birthday Tomye! And a belated birthday to Lili, who made 10 years old last weekend!

Relationship Workshops for African Americans

These Saturday afternoons, 1-3 p.m., in March workshops are for African American families, couples, singles, parents and friends who feel challenged in their relationships with significant others, their parents, their children. Learn very useful strategies and communication skills. Led by Achebe with other guest speakers. Call (510) 978-0510 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it The donation is $10 per session although no one will be turned away. Saturday, March 8, is for men and women; Saturday, March 15, is for men only; Saturday, March 22, is for women only; and Saturday, March 29, is for men and women. All workshops will be held at EastSide Cultural Center, 2277 International Blvd., Oakland, (510) 533-6629. Visit www.eastsideartsalliance.org.

Speaking Fierce

Speaking Fierce is shaping up to be a fantastic event. In addition to our all-star cast of performers, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney will help us celebrate International Women's Day. Don't miss out on our annual bash! Thursday, March 6, 7-9 p.m. Tickets are $10-$25, although no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

The event is at the First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison St. at 27th in Oakland. Featured that evening are Women's Day with Cynthia McKinney, Bushra Rehman, Climbing PoeTree, Jennifer Johns and the women of TEMPO and SWAN. For more info, call (510) 444-2700, ext. 305, or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

This work by Ajuan Mance is featured in The Art of Living Black Open Studios Week 2. Photo: Wanda Sabir

Last Sunday, March 2, I went by Mills College for TAOLB open studios art tour. There I saw Adekunle Kabir Adejare, whose textiles and fine line ink drawings were marvelous to behold. Duane Conliffe's photographs of people, landscapes and fruit were wonderful to see. I recalled visiting his home studio a few years ago one rainy Sunday. This afternoon was sunny and warm and pleasant. There were refreshments for guests and a pleasant ambiance hovering over the gathering. Lorraine Bonner, who'd sent me a card, had new work: One was a bust with a maze traveling from the groin to the heart, while on the back of the bust there was a maze starting from the top. The lines were black on one side and white on the other. The color had something to do with embracing all of ourselves, both the light and the lesser understood or scary aspects of ourselves, because all of it is a part of the healing journey home - home, the heart. Her table was covered with clay and stone carvings and sculptures: One was a head face with a picture of Lorraine inside the scull, her baby photo illuminated by light.

My feet then took me over to Atiba Sylvia Thomas' table. Well, first I saw Sonia Mañjon, the wonderful director of the Center for Art and Public Life, who is leaving us this June for a position elsewhere. I introduced her to Jeanette Madden, whose work always leaves the canvas, this time in smaller pieces with jeweled straps almost like purse handles, they were so pretty. Inside each frame was a painting, a simple sketch or a combination - next to Jeanette was Nannette's Entermusblues Blue People. She has a Tina Turner and a Marvin Gaye you want to hang in your room and watch them sing. The paintings sing. It's the loudest and quietest concert you ever heard. But she also had this really cute painting of this little boy on the toilet.

When I walked in, I'd greeted Latisha Baker, whose paintings on wood, her brush fire, I think you've probably heard me speak of before. Well, she had some of her larger and smaller pieces on display. She also had some more colorful and traditional portraits displayed in her booth. Sister Ajuan Mance, an associate professor at Mills, had these really cool folks, some mixed media and others semi-caricatures of Black men

Back to Atiba. OK, so I tell my friend, if you want to get me a present, you can buy me one of her pieces, and he says, "I don't have a lot of money, but pick out something." I was like, "Wow, right now?" He said, "Yes." So I looked at a few pieces and settled on "God will take care of it." It's made from rusted tools and a red cowrie. The figure is balancing on one marble, the other is on her head; the arms are a nail and the body is a tool. The red cowry covers the stomach. It is balanced, yet the balance is precarious because one foot is on a marble and the head, if it tips, might drop the marble.

Robert H. King of the Angola 3 and Angela Davis of Critical Resistance are depicted in the 509 Larkin Gallery Alley and both spoke at the San Francisco State University conference. Photo: Wanda Sabir

This weekend is an opportunity to visit other artists on Week 2 of TAOLB tour, March 8 and 9, in Lafayette, Martinez, Richmond and San Pablo. I'm going to go by Karen and Malik's place, "The Blue Room," 1814 Gaynor Ave., Richmond, (510) 931-8639. I might drive out to Vallejo to Ethnic Notions, 318 Georgia St., (707) 647-7335, for SaLongo Lee and two other artists, but I'm not sure. I want to go by the Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond, for the TAOLB show and also for Emory Douglas' show. If you haven't seen either, TAOLB closes March 14.

Visit www.taolb.org and call (510) 620-6772. There are many satellite exhibits throughout town in San Francisco, San Pablo and Oakland. Many close March 14 or have already closed. The exhibit at the San Francisco African American Art and Culture Complex is through March 31, San Pablo Gallery in San Pablo and Stoneridge Galley in Oakland are through March 30, and the Women's Cancer Resource Gallery, renamed to honor the late Rae Louise Hayward, is up through March 14, www.wcrc.org. You can also visit www.therac.org.

California Prison Culture

Saturday morning I finally got to visit the exhibit "Criminal: Art and Criminal Justice in America." There was also a symposium, "California Prison Culture: Art, Issues and Dialogue." I stayed for a few hours, walked through the exhibition and then stayed to listen to Angela Y. Davis give the keynote. I then ran over to the 509 Ellis Gallery to see the Haitian artists' mixed media exhibit, before heading over to San Pablo to a divorcee party - not really, it was a house blessing, the blessing: the divorce.

Later that evening I went back to San Francisco for a play at Multi-Ethnic Theatre at The Next Stage, "A Secret for Next Sunday." Written by Charles Johnson - no, not the author of "Middle Passage" - it starred a good friend, Judith Sims as Mattie. It wasn't the story of two old guys about to die - what's the name of that movie? No one was rich. But it was the story of two old guys with a secret one couldn't let go.

"Criminal" is not a large exhibit, but it certainly is an emotional one, I didn't allow myself to participate in it. I stayed objective, although the plates with last meals etched into the designs, the shear multitude that's displayed - and then to hear the audio, a woman's voice reading off the inmate's name and what he ate, was a bit much. They were such pretty ceramic plates too, the blue design.

Then there was the architectural mapping of cell design. Spread out in the center of the gallery, the walls were flat and we could walk through the design. "The House that Herman Build" was playing in an adjoining gallery, while one could hear audio of Robert H. King in the background. One also heard lions roaring ... the gallery director told me not to worry, there were no lions loose. (The SF Zoo is nearby.) Artist Richard Kamler's "The Sound of Lions Roaring ... Revisited" with sound by Blaise Smith referenced the artist's 1992 broadcast of lions roaring to protest the execution of an inmate at San Quentin. He was cited by the Coast Guard for disturbing the peace, an article posted states.

There was another audio installation accompanying a cartoon depiction of the OJ Simpson verdict. There were paintings of inmates in sexual positions. Painted in a lighthearted style, the seriousness of alternative lifestyles and the potential for injury and exploitation was masked, yet present at the same time.

Rigo 23's rendition of Tookie Williams covered a wall, while on the other end William Pope L.'s "Setting the Table" depicted 19 photos of alleged terrorists circulated to media. The artist printed the prisoner's faces on bologna and then hung them up to dry. Dread Scott's "Lockdown" is another interesting work. His portraits of the men on lockdown and their stories offer another perspective on the complex prison discussion created here.

Another work I really found provocative was Sandow Birk's painting of the landscape surrounding San Quentin, minus the prison. It is so beautiful, too beautiful to have such a horrible blight as a maximum security state prison in its midst. Like the lives behind the walls, it's such wasted potential. Imagine if the men were free to meditate along the ocean path, garden and live in nature, true rehabilitation might be possible, even desired.

Angela Davis in her talk referenced the recent Pew report about prisons: one in every 99.1 adults is locked up, one in every nine African American men ages 20-34. She spoke of the privatization of prisons, especially those in Hawaii, where real estate is too expensive to build there so prisoners are shipped to the mainland to special prisons just for them. "Criminal" closes March 15. Visit www.gallery.sfsu.edu or call (415) 338-6535. The Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., has free admission.

‘Live from Death Row'

Intersection from the Arts' "Prison Project: Live from Death Row" will feature a live amplified phone conversation with death row prisoner and community conversation with James P. Anderson and Barbara Becnell from the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and co-author of books with Stanley Tookie Williams. The event is Tuesday, March 11, at 7 p.m. Intersection is located at 446 Valencia St., San Francisco, between 15th and 16th. Tickets are $5-$15. Visit www.nodeathpenalty.org. You can also call (415) 626-2787 or visit www.theintersection.org.

Wear Orange

Tuesday, March 11, 5-6 p.m., is the "Wear Orange Prisoners Awareness Day" Project Reception with Plain Human. The event is free at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco, (415) 626-2787 or www.theintersection.org

Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre

Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre is in town March 5-9, Wednesday-Sunday, at Cal Performances, UC Berkeley Zellerbach Auditorium, Berkeley campus. Visit for podcasts and ticket information. Shows are 8 p.m. with matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. There is an evening show on Saturday. Visit http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2007/dance/aaadt.php and http://cpinfo.berkeley.edu/information/ for the great photos.

Human Rights Watch Film Fest

See http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=4756 for the Human Rights Watch Film Fest at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning March 13.

The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama

This exhibit, currently on view in the lower level galleries at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. at Third in San Francisco, closes March 16. Curated by Randy Rosenberg and organized by the Committee of 100 for Tibet and The Dalai Lama Foundation there are works by upwards of 88 artists from 30 countries in a landmark exhibition that offers up art as a lens through which we experience our common humanity. Established and emerging artists, celebrities and others have been invited to create works that capture the essence of His Holiness and his mission of peace.

The exhibition, which has been attracting large crowds at every tour venue from Los Angeles to New York, has an explicitly moral and educational purpose: to promote engagement with essential questions of values and ethics. Artists include Marina Abramovic, Seyed Alavi, Laurie Anderson, Richard Avedon, Sanford Biggers, Squeak Carnwath, Long-Bin Chen, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, Santiago Cucullu, Binh Danh, Richard Gere, Jim Hodges, Jenny Holzer, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anish Kapoor, Kimsooja, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Michal Rovner, Sebastiao Salgado, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Mike and Doug Starn, Pat Steir, Adriana Varejao, Bill Viola, William Wiley, Negishi Yoshiro and many more. Don't miss it. Visit http://www.ybca.org/exhibitions/ and http://www.ybca.org/visit/gallery.aspx.

Charles Burnett Films at PFA

Wednesday, March 5, 6:30, "Killer of Sheep," directed by Charles Burnett (U.S., 1977, 81 mins) screens. "A great - the greatest - cinematic tone poem of American urban life," David Edelstein, New York, writes. The film evokes the everyday trials, fragile pleasures and tenacious humor of blue-collar African Americans in 1970s Watts. Burnett made the film on a minuscule budget with a mostly nonprofessional cast, combining keen on-the-street observation with a carefully crafted script.

The episodic plot centers on the character of Stan, a slaughterhouse worker mired in exhaustion, disconnected from his wife, his children and himself. Stan and his neighbors struggle just to get by, let alone get ahead; as befits an L.A. movie, vehicular metaphors of breakdown abound. Only the kids, leaping from roof to roof, seem to achieve a mobility that eludes their elders.

Also on the bill is Burnett's "My Brother's Wedding" (U.S., 1983, 82 mins) at 8:10. It's a restored Director's Cut. "Was lost, but now, I'm found" - it opens with a man singing "Amazing Grace" at a church service in Watts - "My Brother's Wedding" sets up an array of ironies. Thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy is emphatically not found, resentful of familiar roles but unable to create new ones, stuck in a love-hate relationship with his family and his community. Pierce rejects the upward mobility represented by his buppie brother Wendell and Wendell's fiancée Sonia.

Sonia asks, "Is Pierce retarded?" "No, just ghettoized," but the alternate path laid out by his best friend only leads to prison or worse. So here Pierce is, working at the family dry cleaning business, which Burnett uses as a setting for revealing encounters with a range of wonderful supporting characters. Made on a tiny budget and never given a proper theatrical release, the film was reedited by Burnett in 2007 to bring it closer to his original intentions. This is a moving comedy about getting nowhere, an eloquently ambivalent portrayal of the ties that bind.

It is preceded by the short, "Quiet as Kept," also by Charles Burnett (U.S., 2007, 5 mins), a film about a family's everyday struggles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Pacific Film Archive Theater is located at 2575 Bancroft Way, between Telegraph and Bowditch, in Berkeley. Advance tickets are available by calling (510) 642-5249 or visiting http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/tickets. For more information on these and other programs, visit http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries.

SFJAZZ

The season has already kicked off. There are many highlights, among them McCoy Tyner and Savion Glover and Charles Lloyd with his new band, both this month. Visit www.sfjazz.org. I'll be sharing an interview with Tyner in a week. Look for it, and if I get my questions to him, perhaps an interview with Lloyd about his latest CD Rabo De Nube.

‘A Secret for Next Sunday'

Playwright Charles Johnson said he is interested in race as a theme in his work. "A Secret for Next Sunday," his new play, is certainly that. Set in Chicago during a time when youth were unaware of the racial strife that brought many African Americans to northern cities, it's a disrespect elders like Jim decides to address after a drug lord takes his parking space one time too many.

The playwright, an Alabama native, told me after the play that some of the instances in the play reflect his experiences growing up in the South. Enrolled in the white school before integration, he recalled being beat up a lot. Johnson remembered the white only and colored only signs and Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke at his school. He said the mule trains for the poor people's march rolled by his house. Later on, his family moved to California, something that is also reflected in the play, which was workshopped at MET last year.

The two couples, Jim and Mattie and Bessie and McCoy, have know each other from childhood. The men came North together where they met their future wives, whom they thought were northern girls. When the play opens it's been 34 years of friendship and marriage, Jim's hearing is not what is was, and Mattie is not able to cut the rug like she used to, but she goes to church, sings in the choir and is in love with Jim despite her complaints.

I found it interesting that the two, Jim and Mattie had areas of their lives where secrets lay after all the years they'd been together. Jim's philandering also surprised me, and his lies to his wife when she asked him to attend church would come back to haunt him. A lot was haunting Jim by the time the play concluded. Those memories are reenacted on another stage inside Jim's mind, an area of his subconscious the audience is privy to.

Jim and McCoy, as younger men, had had to confront their own bigotry when Jim found out that his little sister Katherine was in love with a white man. The script is not predictable, yet there are times when one thinks that's the direction it's going in. This ambiguity allows for plenty of surprises.
What I like most about the play is the relationship between the two men and the women, not to mention the couples. McCoy really loves his friend and accepts him, faults and all. Their relationship reminds me of the one between Pinetop and Maceo in the film Honeydripper. There is even a deep dark secret the men, especially Jim, need to resolve just like Pinetop does in the film.

Dress warmly. The theatre has no heat and if it's cold outside, it's really cold inside. Lewis Campbell, the director, celebrated his 75thbirthday that evening with the cast. Actress Nathalie Bennett was great as Katherine, Jim's sister, whose white boyfriend, Jerry, played by actor Andrew H. Cushman, ignored the obvious signs. Pay attention to the Emmit Till reflections; they foreshadow the scenes in Jim's mind. He can't change what he did, but he certainly can learn from it. In the end, I wonder if Mattie knew what kind of man she'd married - what he was capable of? I also wonder if the incident which haunts Jim and drives Katherine mad is plausible or a figment of the playwright's imagination.

The play runs Friday-Saturday, March 7-8, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, March 9, at 7 p.m. at The Next Stage, a Multi Ethnic Theatre, 1620 Gough St. near Bush, in San Francisco. Tickets are $20 at the door with generous discounts at www.wehavemet.org. Call (415) 333-6389. Last weekend I ran into Adele and Jack Foley, poets and friends of the director.

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