In Our Own Backyard- March 15th-October 12th

Support the Oakland Museum! 

No running (resting for tomorrow's odyssey)--instead, my mom and I went to see the Oakland Museum's photography exhibit on the East Bay Regional Park District. It was absolutely worth it, and I highly recommend visiting in the next couple of months. The exhibit consists of photographs entirely by Bob Walker, who took more than 40,000 images of East Bay Regional Parks. According to the exhibit, he started visiting the parks because he wanted a place to walk his dog, and from there, he fell in love with the parks and used his photography skills to advocate for protecting several different open spaces in the East Bay. 

Like everything else in the Oakland Museum, the exhibit is moderately sized but extremely well-chosen. Many different aspects of the East Bay Regional Parks are highlighted, and there is a great section on one of the current open space issues in the Bay Area--that of the North Richmond Shoreline--which is actually in MY backyard, being a Richmond resident. 

The whole exhibit left me very grateful for the efforts Bob Walker and many other people have made to preserve the stunning open spaces in and around the urban centers of the East Bay. It even got me thinking about how to get more involved with the struggle to preserve what little open space still exists in Richmond. 

One of the other current exhibits is called Cool Remixed: Bay Area Urban Art and Culture Now. I appreciated the juxtaposition of this exhibit, mostly the work of Oakland urban youth, with the generally people-free images in the Bob Walker exhibit. The treasure of the Bay Area is both--a highly urban population, with escapes routes for those times in which we need solitude, or the chance to run 31 miles without touching pavement, as I will do tomorrow with a bunch of other crazy trail runners!

So hie thee hence to the Oakland Museum of California. Plus, there is a quote in the exhibit by Gambolin' Man, whose blog I absolutely recommend checking out for beautiful pictures and literary luminescence....