Pence Gallery hosts interactive art program

Art museums can often be seen as stuffy or intimidating. Rarely are they associated with bustling atmospheres, live performances, or even food and drinks. The Pence Gallery is different. The gallery, located on D St. in Downtown Davis, aims to defy these norms with its Art After Dark events, a series of interactive art programs hosted on the first Friday of each month.

The series, which is the brainchild of Natalie Nelson, the Pence Gallery director and curator, mixes live music, performance and hands-on art. Each program has a theme based on the current exhibits and also tries to connect the public with working artists.

“It started as an idea in my head, based on some fun times that I had in museums,” Nelson said. “The gallery was the location for collaboration with others, and learning without a capital ‘L.’ We try to keep it inexpensive for students — [admission] is $8 for live music, all the activities and free food.”

Themes are chosen in relation to downstairs exhibits that visitors would find interesting. Currently, the gallery is working with Third Space Art Collective and other organizations to host exhibits with free food and live music.

“Our coordinator Stephanie does most of the planning in terms of activities — I guide her to people in the community who I think are great artists and good with the public,” Nelson said. “I’ve done art for over 20 years in museums so hands-on learning is what I love. So far, we have gotten some local businesses such as Hot Italian and Lagunitas to donate foods and drinks to us, and we’d like to see more working with the local business community.”

Art After Dark is a difficult program to plan, according to Stephanie Kocsik, Pence Gallery special events and social media coordinator. Because the event is so unique, many exhibits are planned from scratch.

“I sit down with the calendar of exhibitions for the year and brainstorm ways to integrate the concepts found on the walls into a Friday night party,” Kocsik said. “I have to think about what’s happening tomorrow and what’s happening months from now and attempt to coordinate these events by finding sponsors, seeking out donations, managing the finances of the Art After Dark grant, designing posters, recruiting live music performances, planning a bar man and making sure all of our permits with the city have been approved.”

The aim for Art After Dark is to bring art to a relaxed and fun environment for everyone in the community. Unlike events that focus solely on art, Art After Dark is focused on getting people inside the gallery and presenting the gallery as an accessible space.

“In proposing Art After Dark, one of our main aims was to bring more Millennials into the gallery,” Kocsik said. “To the younger generation, art galleries seem like a stoic, pristine and aloof atmosphere and art itself seems like a world that is incomprehensible without an MFA in fine art.”

Christopher Tran, third-year art studio major, is interested in Art After Dark, and hopes to attend the next event.

“It’s cool that art is being displayed in a relaxed environment,” Tran said. “I think the live music and the welcoming atmosphere are also good reasons to go.”

The next Art After Dark event will take place at the Pence Gallery on Nov. 4 from 7 to 10 p.m. For tickets and more information, please visit the Pence Gallery’s website.

Written by: Jennifer Duong – arts@theaggie.org

Restaurant offers variety of pizza made from local, organic ingredients

As an international student studying in the United States, I must admit that I have mixed feelings about American cuisine. Juicy hamburgers, cheesy pizzas and extra-large Cokes are all part of my U.S. guilty-pleasures list. I always feel satisfied when eating these foods, and I feast like there’s no tomorrow.

But the pleasure comes at a price; after eating, I need to spend a solid two-hour session at the gym. Luckily, I recently discovered a healthier alternative which satiates all of these guilty pleasures and saves me from a sweaty workout.

I first spotted Hot Italian — the newly-opened Italian pizza restaurant located in Davis Commons, downtown at 500 1st St.  — at the end of Spring Quarter 2016. Last Saturday, I finally had the opportunity to try out this new restaurant and learned about the owner’s endeavor to uphold the Davis community’s healthy and environmentally-friendly lifestyle.  

Hot Italian is a REAL-certified restaurant, which is a “nationally recognized mark of excellence for food and foodservice operators committed to holistic nutrition and environmental stewardship,” according to the United States Healthful Food Council (USHFC).

Hot Italian is the first pizzeria in the United States that has been REAL certified by the USHFC. Not only does the restaurant use fresh, organic ingredients, but its furniture is also made from mostly repurposed materials, such as recycled paper and bamboo.

Hot Italian changes its menu depending on the season and is currently on its fall and winter menu. Customers have about 15 different choices of pizza, including a vegan option, and several choices of salad and desserts. They also serve beer and wine, either produced locally or imported from Italy.

Since it was a chilly Saturday morning, I ordered “Sozzani,” a salad with locally-produced baby spinach and pear; “Materazzi,” Hot Italian’s take on pepperoni pizza; “Gattuso,” a fall special pizza featuring pumpkin; and “Zucchero,” a dessert with Italian hazelnut cream and pear.

Fun fact about the menu: each dish is named after a “hot Italian.” For example, “Sozzani” is named after Franca Sozzani, an Italian journalist and editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia since 1988; “Materazzi” is named after Marco Materazzi, an Italian soccer star.

“Customers sometimes have fun guessing whose names are on the menu,” said Andrea Lepore, a 1992 UC Davis alum and owner of Hot Italian.

All of the dishes I ordered had colorful and aesthetically-pleasing combinations of different fresh ingredients, which made for a perfect Instagram post for all my friends to envy as they studied for midterms. Pepperoni has always been my favorite pizza, and I noticed that they added pitted olives on “Materazzi,” which is a great revamp of the greasy cheese and pepperoni that you’d normally find at other pizza restaurants.

My personal favorite would be “Zucchero.” Fresh out the oven, the warm dessert made me forget the cold rain showering outside. The sweetness was perfect for me, as I find most American desserts are too sweet, and I absolutely loved the smooth texture of the hazelnut cream mixed with chocolate powder.

The pizzas are about $15 each. For UC Davis students, the restaurant offers a lunch special: $5 per slice on weekdays. You can pre-order pizza from Hot Italian by phone or by downloading the Hot Italian app. Hot Italian also provides delivery service via the Joyrun app. For more information and to view the menu, please visit the Hot Italian website at http://www.hotitalian.net.

Written by: Betty Wu — arts@theaggie.org

Festival endures storm, sets delayed and cancelled

Treasure Island Music Festival — the brainchild of Another Planet Entertainment and Noise Pop’s collaboration— held its 10th anniversary (and very last) festival last weekend, Oct. 15 to 16.

For a Bay Area festival held each October for over a decade, I really can’t help but wonder how TIMF had never previously experienced rain. That is, until last weekend.

But describing the festival’s climate as “rainy” would be a drastic understatement. It was more of an ongoing battle between dangerous, set-cancelling winds, torrential downpours, confiscated umbrellas (you think festival hats are an impediment on your view) and mud — lots and lots of mud.

In fact, by day two, festival fashion had been entirely abandoned, and anyone not wearing ponchos and knee-high rainboots was cast off to the Wells Fargo prize booth to take shelter.

It didn’t help, either, that the festival planners continuously delayed sets due to the wind, causing huge gaps in which there were no performances for hours at a time. This left many festival-goers standing around, sinking in mud and eating delicious Filipino-fusion burritos (a rare bright spot in the otherwise-gloomy atmosphere, I discovered).

On Saturday, the worst day of the weekend in terms of weather, many attendees left early to escape the conditions, despite the festival’s determination to persevere through inclement weather. The festival coordinators sent out a mass email Saturday night claiming the festival would be extended until midnight rather than its originally scheduled 10:30 p.m. conclusion.

Sunday-goers were less fortunate; James Blake’s set was cancelled, and this was only announced after we had already sunk two inches deep in mud during the hour-long wait.

But I’ll get to that later. So here’s the best of Sunday, which was the only day I chose to endure the storm:

Most Anticipated Set

James Blake, the experimental electronic artist whose eerie falsetto resembles that of Bon Iver, was the most obviously anticipated set of the weekend. But his set was postponed by an hour due to “dangerous winds” (it’s still unclear why those winds were more dangerous than any we had previously experienced that weekend) and was eventually cancelled; it’s difficult not to anticipate something continuously being taken from you.

In an attempt to console festival attendees, Blake tweeted after the announced cancellation that he would try to put on a substitute show for the following night. Fortunately, more than a substitute show was procured; any TIMF ticket holder had free entrance to Blake’s Monday night show at Oakland’s Fox Theater (a much drier location, in addition to being a premiere venue).

Best Stage Design

What electronic duo Purity Ring lacked in sound, they made up for in extravagant stage design. With hundreds of strung lights hanging from the top of the stage onto the performers’ knees, it was hard not to be mesmerized by the color-coordinated rain of light.

Lead singer Megan James often walked through the lights, pushing them to either side of her as she swam through their color. Her DJ companion, Corin Roddick, had drum pads atop what looked like lampshades, and each one pulsed pink with every tap.

However, these aesthetic choices could only be replicated so many times before the audience became numb to their awe. It was obvious that after a few songs, the audience — including myself — had become unamused. And yes, James’ voice sounds exactly as timid and squeaky in speech as it does in song.

Most Skillful Behind-the-Head-Guitar-Playing

“Oh, Andy” was probably the most frequently used phrase during the set of alternative psychedelic rock group Mac DeMarco. Although I was unaware of the off-the-wall humor Andy the Guitarist is so well known for, it came as no surprise. With aviators straight from 1973 and a ‘stache that took up about half of his face, his attempts to gain the audience’s sympathy regarding his “recently deceased horse,” Buckles, and his adamance that Halloween was in two months — no more and no less — unphased me by the end of the show.

Though their solos and skillful behind-the-head guitar playing were surprisingly adept, DeMarco’s blunt proclamation of his tequila drinking from the night prior was pretty indicative of the show’s sound. Their set was, in retrospect, the musical equivalent of a hangover: discordant and blurry, but better with time.

Best Surprise

Christine and the Queens is, plainly put, some of today’s best new music — well, new to me at least, as well as for most of the US. Her French art pop, inspired by the support of a few drag queens, Héloïse Letissier inspires in ways I knew not possible.

As a strong supporter of the LGBTQ community, Letissier attributes her stage confidence to the drag queens she encountered in London who not only inspired her artistic endeavors, but took her under their wing at a time when she struggled with suicide and a bad breakup.

But what made her set so incredible was not her sound, but rather the complementary nature of her music and choreography. Her hit single, Tilted, is straight from a Michael Jackson music video, with choreography that more closely resembles an eloquent series of everyday movements than it does dance. But it’s more than her hypnotic dances that resemble the pop of Michael Jackson (yes, such choreography was present on the festival stage, too); Christine and the Queens boast catchy melodies that hold profound messages of self-confidence and identity — components uncharacteristic of today’s pop.

The festival, to no one’s surprise, will no longer be held on Treasure Island, inevitably resulting in a new title as well. And, after this year’s festival, such an identity change certainly won’t harm future promotions.

R.I.P. Treasure Island Music Festival — you certainly left kicking up a storm.

Written by: Ally Overbay – arts@theaggie.org