News

This May, the David Brower Center celebrates its 3rd anniversary. The 50,000 square foot sustainable-community center was built in May 2009 despite it being the height of the recession. It is a space that has become an inspiration for action and a physical expression of the power of community. I’ve only been in the building…

When modern living encroaches on pastoral land, open space and local food access aren’t the only things at stake. What happens to the generations-old land practices that once thrived there? Are they lost forever? What about the people who depend on land for their livelihoods? The David Brower Center’s current art exhibition features two artists…

Land, Use examines the role of art in forging a healthier relationship between man and the environment. We live in a world where it has become gloriously passé to ask the question, “Is it art?” Notions of what is beautiful, what is didactic, what is science, and what simply exists because of a metabolic necessity…

This Housing and Environmental Center project is a complex mixed-use development combining affordable housing, a LEED Platinum office building/conference center for the environmental movement, a restaurant, retail and public parking for the downtown Berkeley’s retail district. The intention of the project is to bring together themes of urban repair, environmentalism and social equity. The site…

VISUAL ART Artists are makers, though rarely of history. But Fernando García-Dory and Amy Franceschini, two internationally recognized artists, seem to have a gift for it. “Perhaps,” García-Dory says, “when you start with a long perspective on history, you start to make history as well.” At the David Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery, their joint…

At a table set with a locally grown feast — hearty potato, kale and white bean soup, cornbread, fresh butter and mushroom gravy — sits a group of individuals all involved in sustainable farming in the Bay Area. As they discuss strategies in environmental activism, they sit below a makeshift covered wagon, the culmination artwork…

How much life passes through a single one-foot by one-foot spot in the San Francisco Bay every day? Photographer David Liittschwager set out to answer that question over the course of 14 days this past spring. From a sailboat anchored in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, he and an assistant used a 12-inch…

Naturalist E.O. Wilson once wrote that “a lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.” Easy for him to say: He’s made a distinguished career out of studying ants and a lot of other little wriggly things that most of us dread finding in the shower in the…

The Golden Gate Bridge, approaching its 75th anniversary in May 2012, is the most photographed bridge in the world — but what about what lies underneath it? Photographer David Liittschwager decided to address just that. As part of his “One Cubic Foot” series, Liittschwager photographed the abundance of life that travels not over the bridge…

Sierra Club founder David Brower advised activists: “Have a good time saving the world. Otherwise, you’re just going to depress yourself.” We need to start thinking seriously about human futures. The 22 Bay Area artists selected for Hello Tomorrow by the Berkeley Art Museum’s Lucinda Barnes, the Brower Center’s Amy Tobin, and this writer (wearing…