East Bay Date Itinerary: Art, Food, Ice Cream, Booze
Author:Nicole PowellI would be happy to go on a date like this. Its simple and unfussy. First start out with a gallery opening at Swarm Gallery in Oakland. Here you’ll find the exploratory works of Robin Johnston and Chelsea Pegram in “In Flux: Meditations on Space and Time,” opening on Saturday the 26th. This sneak peak makes the show look pretty interesting. Swarm Gallery offers the following: “Highly oriented toward materiality and process, Johnston and Pegram each uniquely explore concepts of space and time.”
Chelsea Pegram, Untitled installation view (2010), Drywall, tracing paper, polyurethane
Robin Johnston, Two Weeks in July, Point Boniat (2009), Handwoven cotton, 22X58 inches.
Here’s a little bit about the artists so you can impress your date:
* Robin Johnston lives and works in San Francisco and is currently an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. She holds an MFA in Textiles from California College of the Arts and a BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She grew up in Lexington, Kentucky.
* Chelsea Pegram is currently attending the MFA program at Mills College. She lives in Oakland and has shown regularly in the Bay Area.
After you’ve had your fill of gallery fun, head over to the Rockridge neigbhorhood and check out À Côté for dinner, a local favorite that specializes in small plates with yummy seasonal ingredients.
If its going well, you could meander down College Avenue and get some ice cream from Ici, which, as the block-long lines will confirm, has something delicious going on. Use your line time as an opportunity to do that classic first date stuff (Oh! are you cold? Here’s my sweater.)
And if its still going really well, head back down College and grab a drink at Wood Tavern.
Art
Food
Sweets
Booze.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
