East Bay Magazine

16/01/2025

“Born of the Bear Dance,” now at the Oakland Museum, celebrates the photography of Native American artist Dugan Aguilar. This exhibition covers just a small portion of the more than 25,000 photographs and artifacts in the collection that the Aguilar family recently donated to the museum. In addition to photography, there are weaving arts and basket pieces to discover. A documentary film about Aguilar, his family and his subjects is also included.

Read more about this exhibit at Oakland Museum of California below!

Tribal truths exhibited at Oakland Museum, as ‘Born of the Bear Dance’ celebrates Native American photographer Dugan Aguilar.

15/01/2025

Two tiny steps and a 15-minute kiss launched the 40-year marriage of Daniel Knapp and Mary Lou Van Deventer. The couple lives close to the Richmond border in Contra Costa County and are co-founders of Berkeley-based Urban Ore, a material recovery enterprise in operation since 1980.

Knapp, 84, is a sociologist most noted in the professional reuse, recycling and composting field for establishing his 12 Master Categories of Discarded Resources. Van Deventer, 80, is an environmental journalist with a career prior to Urban Ore, where she now manages special projects. Together, they are leaders and active participants in the Northern California Recycling Association, Zero Waste Action Committee, the annual National Zero Waste Conference, and other regional and national activist and advocacy endeavors. They are parents of two adult daughters... ❤️♻️

Read more about the origin (love) story of Urban Ore below!

A recycling love story births Urban Ore, as its founders combine a happy marriage and zero-waste business in their quest to save the planet.

14/01/2025

Composer, artist and tennis coach Cordell Ho is a Bay Area native, creating theater-inspired mixed-media films and experimental music, exploring mindfulness and expression, culture and the fusion of sound and visuals.

Ho has not only composed and performed several operas, symphonic pieces and film scores—such as “Celestial Search” (Italy, 1992), “Hui Jia” (New York, 1982) and “iPH” (San Francisco, 2006)—but he’s also held coaching positions at UC Berkeley and prestigious tennis clubs across the country.

Travel, made possible especially through tennis, has been a major influence on Ho’s explorative style...

Read more below! 🎶🎹🎭🎎🎥

Tennis pro artist engages in experimental explorations as Kensington's Cordell Ho blends musical expertise with a passion for visual art.

08/01/2025

Elizabeth Vecchiarelli teaches all of the core classes at Preserved, her Temescal culinary store. These “hands-on workshop experiences” explore a wide range of topics, such as fermented pickling, canning fundamentals and sourdough bread making. The workshops began in 2015 when the first iteration of Preserved was housed in a little shed on Piedmont Avenue. They quickly became popular.

“It was just very clear that the concept had a broad level of interest,” Vecchiarelli explained. “Individually, the culinary techniques are niche, but together there’s actually a niche for everyone.” Every potential student might not be interested in the science behind fermentation, but they might have sentimental feelings about a grandparent who made a habit out of canning…

Read more below. 🥫🥟🍽️

Preserved offers the goods, from scratch—Elizabeth Vecchiarelli's culinary store in Temescal hosts workshops rooted in the community.

06/01/2025

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake. Symbolically, the snake is known for wisdom and agility. But also, snakes can represent evil or treachery, while the element of wood supposedly strengthens the snake’s growth and versatility.

Yep, that all seems about right for the months ahead. And it makes this year’s inaugural issue an auspicious one. We can gain inspiration from the creativity, resilience and values-based choices made by all of our East Bay neighbors featured in these pages…

Read more of the letter from our editor below! 🎊 🐍 🪵

What serpent guides teach us: A New Year hope for rebirth and transformation, and an inaugural issue full of the same.

01/01/2025

Happy New Year! Flip through our first issue of 2025 below! 🎊

ON THE COVER “Sarah Keller, Chaw'se Roundhouse,” Dugan Aguilar, 1995; collection of the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the family of Dugan Aguilar.

Read East Bay Magazine January 2025 by Weeklys on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our platform. Start here!

18/12/2024

Nico Bianchi writes: “I was first introduced to the magic of a properly timed rum-based libation by Danville resident Kent Wisneor, known at some local bar tops as “Tiki Kent.” Out of the many important tell-tale signs of a great tiki experience, he told me that none are as nearly important as an unwaveringly rock solid Mai Tai—the barebones being rum, lime, an almond syrup called “orgeat,” some bitters and mint. It’s the drink that separates the wannabes from the know hows, the real mark of a quality tiki bar…”

Read more below!

17/12/2024

When the dishes arrive at the table, Sun Moon Studio’s dining room undergoes a subtle transformation. On the bottom floor of a newer build in West Oakland, the restaurant is a small rectangular room. The cold concrete floor and the modern interiors suddenly soften and warm up. A correspondence begins between a bowl of bright orange mussels and the surrounding décor—bouquets of blooming wildflowers, a platter of pumpkins on display at the kitchen counter and a stack of pulchritudinous persimmons that look fat enough to burst…

Seasonal produce is the star at Sun Moon Studio, where Chefs Sarah Cooper and Alan Hsu’s cooking manifests the bounty of a farmer’s harvest.

11/12/2024

The musical ministry of Samora Pinderhughes grew out of the progressive soul of Berkeley.

Pianist, composer, vocalist and anti-incarceration activist Pinderhughes has thrived since moving to New York City in 2009 to study jazz piano at Juilliard. But rather than hewing to a straight-ahead jazz path, he embarked on a wending journey that has taken him from the dungeons of America’s death row to the heights of American culture as he’s reconfigured conversations about crime, punishment, forgiveness and healing.

Returning to Berkeley for his first hometown concert since 2018, Pinderhughes plays Cornerstone on Thursday, Dec. 12, focusing on material from his revelatory new album, “Venus Smiles Not In The House of Tears.”

Read more below! 🎶

Samora Pinderhughes returns to Berkeley when the activist pianist plays his first hometown concert since 2018 at Cornerstone on Dec. 12.

10/12/2024

Everyone knows people who are ardent in support of local organizations and causes. For those folks, ideal gifts can be donations in their names to those organizations or memberships/subscriptions to places they frequently visit. Here are some suggestions…

Nonprofit gifts that give locally, or ideas for supporting local organizations and encouraging experiences.

02/12/2024

Our December issue is here! ✨

Flip through the e-edition below or visit eastbaymag.com.

Read East Bay Magazine December 2024 by Weeklys on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our platform. Start here!

26/11/2024

The white truffles arrive once a week from Piemonte. By the time this article is published, they’ll be gone, just like the black truffles from Umbria, whose precarious shelf life dictates a twice-weekly shipment. Each variety is flown from Italy to grace the pappardelle at Donato and Co. only when they are in season.

Upon suggesting to executive chef Gianluca Guglielmi that he might use truffles from another region—say the geographically closer Pacific Northwest—I receive a polite kind of scoff. One can smell the difference, he says, all the way from the end of the table…

It doesn’t get better than Donato and Co., where Chef Gianluca Guglielmi serves housemade Italian food with an emphasis on hospitality.

19/11/2024

Oakland’s vintage shops may be one-of-a-kind, yet many have similar beginnings. Karen Fort, owner of in Rockridge, attests: “There’s a lot of origin stories that start like mine.”

At in West Oakland, shop owner Jeanette De Mello used to go vintage shopping with her grandmother.

Lou Lou Rosenthal says she and Kylee Kienitz, who are co-owners of on Piedmont, have been “collectors slash hoarders since we were young,” and met selling their stashes in pop-ups across the bay.

Today, they all remain dedicated to the genre with the same fervor that hooked them in the first place—in a time when vintage has never been so loosely defined and in demand...

Vintage, tried and true: These Oakland shops are committed to preserving the value of vintage clothing amidst a vastly growing market.

13/11/2024

Coco Chanel’s famous aphorism, “Fashion changes, style remains,” is as true as ever. Images from bygone eras often include one person clad in an outfit that stands the test of time.

Here are three very different East Bay people who make, as well as exude, style. What they have in common are vision for detail, a willingness to ignore trendiness, and confidence that what they create and wear is uniquely them.

East Bay stylistas show where there’s style, there’s fashion. And they share a confidence that what they create and wear is uniquely them.

12/11/2024

Colors can lift people’s spirits,” says designer Lesley Evers. “I have a customer who said she started wearing our clothes and it changed her mindset. She ate better, started moving more and felt better about herself. I was so touched.”

Since 2008, Evers has gradually created a line of womenswear that embodies the sophisticated, exuberant, and practical needs and desires of her customers. Launching the company that bears her name with dresses and eventually selling at over 100 boutiques nationwide, Evers in 2012 opened a bricks-and-mortar shop in Oakland.

Lesley Evers' style lifts spirits, as the Oakland womenswear designer combines know-how, nostalgia and a sense of fun.

30/10/2024

Our November issue is here! Flip through the e-edition below. 🎊

Read East Bay Magazine November 2024 by Weeklys on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our platform. Start here!

18/10/2024

Elizabeth Rosner‘s new book, “Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening,” is by no means a prescriptive, how-to, self-help book. But it could be. Focused on listening and hearing, the Berkeley-based writer remembers and reflects on past and current auditory landmarks and their impact on health and wellbeing.

Taken as a guidebook, “Third Ear” maps a wide-ranging journey encompassing everything from molecular aspects of hearing to the negative effects on humans of noise; the benefits of music; of listening to whales, pods of dolphins or birds; the complexity of different languages; the nuances of expression; and the most profound interstitial or vast elements of hearing, such as silence or words left unspoken, but nonetheless, absorbed…

Read more below. 📖

Cover image courtesy of Counterpoint
Author photo by Tora Smart

Berkeley author Elizabeth Rosner says listen and learn in her latest book, ‘Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening.'