Berkeley-based jewelry designer Alison Antelman is among the artists displaying and selling their wares this weekend at the Contemporary Crafts Market in San Francisco.Antelman works in gold and silver, and with precious and semi-precious stones as well as sea glass collected from Northern California beaches. She says, "On a lucky day, I find purple, pink and uranium yellow glass. So much of the glass I find fits the shapes that I envision for a necklace, bracelet or ring. Every single piece I set is in its original shape." Read More

San Francisco in the 1960s was the center of counterculture thinking.It was the time of the Summer of Love, the Human Be-In and Haight Street. Within this context, mild-mannered Bay Area artist Alexandra Docili began painting. Her works on paper, though clearly influenced by the times, emanate a fragility and delicacy rarely attributed to the decade. An integral member of the Visionary Art movement begun in the latter half of the 1960s in San Francisco, Docili and other artists of the movement sought to interpret the era’s counterculture ideas. Read More

"A Flowering Tree," which had its American premiere in Davies Hall this weekend, has some of John Adams’ best work — in fact, it’s a two-hour treasure house of beautiful music. Obviously a (or the) leading opera composer of our time, Adams has never given us such emotional, just plain gorgeous sound as in "Flowering Tree." It is a major, wonderful work, one which — significantly — leaves the listener wishing to hear it again, and wanting more like it. Read More

The revue "Shopping! The Musical" is about to celebrate a year running in the cozy Shelton Theater off Union Square, and it’s not a surprise. Billed as the "the show for everyone who has ever shopped," the fun, minimalist production is the perfect salve for a tourist tired after a busy day on his or her feet, or even for an office worker easing into the weekend. Read More