Richmond Art Center recovering after losing major donor: ‘We are in the black now, not red.’

A wall of photographs in a big room with a table and bench in the middle. In the dozens of photographs of various sides are closeup shots of people of various ages, races and builds.

When the Richmond Art Center lost its biggest donor last year, Executive Director José Rivera said he was worried about the future. “Over many years, that donor contributed $100,00 annually, making him the most significant benefactor in the center’s history when considering the cumulative sum of his contribution over time,” he said. “We lost him…

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Richmond Art Center celebrates Dia de los Muertos ‘to educate people about such an important cultural event.’

Richmond Art Center

Amid the drug store offerings of Halloween consumer goods, any Dia de los Muertos-themed item invariably sticks out. Decorations featuring iconic skulls and cempasúchil marigolds, or candy branded with characters from Pixar’s film “Coco” speak to the growing commercialization of a holiday once outside of the corporate limelight. But the holiday has more cultural significance…

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Around the Way: Rhythmic Metals

Around the Way: Rhythmic Metals

Ed Lay is a computer programmer and a metals teacher at Richmond Art Center. Learn how he found his passion for teaching metal artworks to the community in the first of Richmond Confidential’s ‘Around the Way’ video series.

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Richmond Art Center: building community through art

You don’t need to be an artist to work with clay or fibers. All you need is the desire. And a little support from your friends doesn’t hurt. The Richmond Art Center provides artistically inclined residents with potter’s wheels, electric kilns and looms to transform their creativity into a variety of art forms. Located near…

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Halloween treats for Richmond families

Trick or treat? Halloween is here! Richmond Art Center is treating children to seasonal chills and thrills with its annual family art making event: Skeletonfest. This event was free and open to the public. Three girls drew scary skulls on paper plates with colorful sugar paint. One girl couldn’t help taste her art work. No…

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Fall exhibit opens at the Richmond Art Center

As part of the RAC’s Fall Exhibit, Feldman takes viewers through a timeline of events with references from her up bringing, world travels and the horrors of war and ethnic genocide. The work takes on dark topics, but does so playfully. For example, Feldman’s “War Toy” series juxtaposes the grandness and intrigue of lethal weapon with their ability and to destroy.

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Kennedy High art teacher finalist for The Ed Fund

kennedy high art steve mainini

Dozens of palm-sized faces hang from the ceiling in Steve Mainini’s art classroom at Kennedy High School. The ceramic reflections of former students dangle in wire cages and defy gravity as if trapped in some sort of bad dream. But for the hundreds of students that have enrolled in Mainini’s art classes the past eight…

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Richmond Art Center features artists abroad and close to home

Artist Antonio Canet Hernandez entrusted a series of 95 block prints illustrating the Cuban Revolution to the Richmond Regla Friendship Committee in 2003. A decade later, they are finally all framed and on display at the Richmond Art Center. This is a detail from Print 84, which is captioned, "On January 8, 1959, the triumphant entry of the Commander-in-Chief and his victorious guerrillas took place in Havana - Armando Hart." (Photo by: Rachel Waldholz)

Striking block prints illustrating scenes from the Cuban Revolution, pastel canvases full of memories from a childhood in Philadelphia, and a medley of photographs, sculptures and paintings from black artists throughout the Bay Area – in its first exhibitions of the year, the Richmond Art Center covers a lot of ground but keeps the connections…

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