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Kay Sekimachi @ BAMPFA - Lisa Mezzacappa: ‘The Electronic Lover’ - SF Mime Troupe: Tales of the Resistance, Vol. 2

Fiber artist and weaver Kay Sekimachi...
craftinamerica.org
Fiber artist and weaver Kay Sekimachi...

This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts, guest host Sarah Cahill talks with independent curator Jenelle Porter about the Kay Sekimachi retrospective at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Also, conversations with composer and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, about her new podcast opera The Electronic Lover; and with actors Francis Jue and Rotimi Agbabiaka from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about the Troupe’s new summer podcast and radio series Tales of the Resistance, Volume 2: Persistence.

This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts, guest host Sarah Cahill talks with independent curator Jenelle Porter about the Kay Sekimachi retrospective at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Also, conversations with composer and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, about her new podcast opera The Electronic Lover; and with actors Francis Jue and Rotimi Agbabiaka from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about the Troupe’s new summer podcast and radio series Tales of the Resistance, Volume 2: Persistence.

Through October 24, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents Kay Sekimachi: Geometries, an extensive solo exhibition of textile art by Berkeley-based artist Kay Sekimachi, who has been a significant figure in the fiber arts community for more than seventy years. The exhibition, created by BAMPFA guest curator Jenelle Porter, encompasses nearly fifty objects spanning six decades of Sekimachi’s creative practice, highlighting formal and material breakthroughs that illustrate her influence on the field of fiber arts.

Kay Sekimachi was born in 1926 in San Francisco and lives and works in Berkeley, California, where she has resided for most of the past ninety years. She attended the California College of Arts and Crafts from 1946 to 1949 and later studied at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Liberty, Maine. As fiber artist and weaver, she is perhaps best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.

We talk about the online premiere of The Electronic Lover, a new ‘audio opera’ by Bay Area composer, bassist, bandleader, and producer Lisa Mezzacappa, and New York writer Beth Lisick. The Electronic Loveris a serial audio drama set in Internet chatrooms in the early 1980s, at the moment when we first invited computers into the most intimate aspects of our lives. The cast includes six lead vocalists, a choir, an ensemble of three instrumentalists, and a narrator. Episodes of the series are free to listen to on all podcast platforms.

Plus, we talk with actors Francis Jue and Rotimi Agbabiaka from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, about the Company’s new summer podcast and radio series Tales of the Resistance, Volume 2: Persistence.

With the pandemic still going on, the SF Mime Troupe has once again decided to cancel their traditional Summer musical tour along Bay Area parks, and instead produce a second summer of serialized, original political comedy radio plays.

Open Air will carry Tales of the Resistance Volume 2: Persistence for ten weeks over the summer, starting July 8, as part of our Corona Radio Theater Initiative.

Open Air, with guest host Sarah Cahill, heard live on Thursday, July 1 at 1pm, will be archived at this location afterwards. Listen now or anytime…

Niels Swinkels is a freelance journalist, musicologist, sound engineer, and radio producer. Born and raised in the Netherlands, he studied English and Musicology at the University of Nijmegen. Before moving to San Francisco, he was the Arts Editor, and Senior Classical Music & Opera critic for Brabants Dagblad, a Dutch daily newspaper. In addition to producing KALW’s Open Air, a weekly radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts, he is also a wine guy at Trader Joe’s Nob Hill in San Francisco...