First Thursday Report

"Give and Take: Artists and Youth in Dialogue"
Back in the days before budget cuts, when there was an art teacher in every school, kids created a recognizable style of art -- a crazy mixture of scintillating color and dimensionally oblique figures. One of the few positive developments on the arts-education front is the San Francisco Arts Education Project (SFAEP), which sends working artists into the classroom to both make art and explain its history. By pairing up 20 Bay Area artists with classrooms over the past year, the program allowed students to have fun making art and learn about it in a more critical manner. A show in the Financial District's Mills Building curated by Larry Rinder shows some of what came out of the program this year, when the teams gave each other different problems to "solve" through art-making projects. SFAEP's "Give and Take: Artists and Youth in Dialogue" is up through July 10 in the Mills Building, 220 Bush (at Montgomery), S.F. Admission is free; call 551-7990.

"Feed"
"Ewwwww!" went the mouths that belonged to the eyes that feasted on Tom Patton's Olive Loaf, a photograph that's part of the group show "Feed." The exhibit focuses on the role and the many incarnations of food in our culture, both celebrating and criticizing our current relations with one of the few things man can't live without. The work varies greatly, from Deanne Sokolin's Web site The Cooking Chronicles, documenting Jewish cultural identity through the making of meals; to the film Yumm by Les Blank; to a Tupperware party thrown by performance artist Helen Terrain; to tea readings. One of the most thought-through pieces, Lisa Gould's installation Fifteen Sauce....Endlessly Consumed, documents the evolution of a veal stock. The piece consists of elegant black-and-white photos of the stock being cooked, along with bags of cheesecloth suspended from the ceiling that drip with an actual gelatinized stock into silver cooking pots on the floor. In her personal statement, Gould quotes Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "The universe is nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives eats." "Feed" is up through June 13 at S.F. Camerawork, 115 Natoma (at Second Street), S.F. Admission is free; call 764-1001.

-- Marcy Freedman