Arts & Entertainment

4th Annual Chocolate and Beer Festival

Hundreds of Bay Area residents flocked to the Craneway Pavilion on Saturday for a delicious end to SF Beer Week. Attendees sampled beer of all hues from nine different breweries and chocolates and other sweets from twenty confectioners. The event also featured live music, raffles, beer pong, a bouncy castle, and unseasonably warm afternoon sunshine. Proceeds benefited Richmond’s Police Activities League, which offers athletic, artistic and academic activities for local youth.  

Codex International Book Fair attracts Bay Area bibliophiles

Bibliophiles from throughout the Bay Area gathered Sunday at Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion for the first day of the Codex International Book Fair, which will be open until Wednesday, February 13. The fair was hosted by the Codex Foundation, a not-for-profit group that partners with book arts organizations around the world to preserve the hand-made book as a form of art. The fair featured 180 exhibitors who came to Richmond from around the world to display and sell their creations. The…

Young poets to stage Richmond-set ‘Romeo and Juliet’

Richmond Artists With Talent will perform Saturday a one-night-only urbanized version of Romeo and Juliet, swapping William Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter verse for street slang and slam poetry in a familiar tale of two star-crossed lovers — this time from the wrong sides of the tracks. Te’s Harmony, written by Donte Clark of RAW Talent, presents a gritty, albeit artistic, view of Richmond, a city divided by a North-versus-Central gang turf war through the eyes of Te (Clark) and Harmony (D’neise…

Richmond students prepare for countywide Poetry Out Loud contest

It was less than two weeks until Contra Costa’s Poetry Out Loud recitation contest and 9th grader Allyson Gayoso, a 14-year-old from Richmond’s Salesian High School, was reciting a poem from memory with the confidence of a seasoned orator. Inside a small, quiet office, Gayoso practiced the words of “On an Unsociable Family,” an 18th century poem by English poet Elizabeth Hands. Her audience consisted of her mother, who had arrived a moment before to take her home. Gayoso read…

Richmond Art Center features artists abroad and close to home

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 local. The Art Center opened its three newest exhibitions on Jan. 12. Its main gallery is host to The Art of Living Black, the 17th…

2012 Year in Review

From Richmond’s triumphant bid to host the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s second campus to worrying phases of gun violence earlier in the year and the historic November election, here are some of the stories that made the headlines on Richmond Confidential this year.

RAC’s Holiday Arts Festival goes green

Richmond Arts Center has been holding holiday arts festivals for more than 50 years. But this is the first time its festival has gone green, thanks to volunteers who spent a week in November making decorations for the Dec. 2 festival out of old newspapers. This shift from new to recycled materials is innovative, cost-efficient and environmentally friendly. And it represents a more dignified final use for newspapers than serving as birdcage liner for the family parrot. “People have donated…

Bandwidth: Hip hop artist YSD makes waves in Richmond

Meet Young Shorty Doowop, or Y.S.D., one of Richmond’s rising stars — a female rapper and R&B artist who’s been writing her own songs since childhood. She performs around the Bay Area, dishing up beats from her first album, “I Love All My Fans: The Mixtape” and a new single, “Flexin’ on Em” (which comes with its own dance). She’s been featured on KMEL 106.1 FM, danced in music videos with Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, and sells her “I…