The little connections

Barry Sakata, the gallery owner profiled in Arts&culture, recently served as a guest juror for a University of California, Davis, art show. The 25 winning entries will be up until April 2 at the university’s Memorial Union Art Gallery. UC Davis undergraduate and graduate students were invited to submit up to three pieces to the competition; 75 artworks were entered. Paul Lynch won best of show for a piece entitled “Wooden Kimono.” Merit certificates were awarded to Lily Chen, Chih-Lang Hwan, Allison Taylor and Heather Brubaker. Other artists include Sahar Alsawaf, Debbie Baskerville, Norma Beirne, Lauren Carbone, Lindsay Coats, Helen DiCarlo, Pamela Frickmann, Maria Bartelme Glick, Kellen Hennessy, Pamela Lee, Danielle Levinson, Diana Mitchell, Mollie Oblinger, Juliana Paciulli, Mari Schroeder, Jason Trinidad, Feng-Shu Wang, Marc Williams, Fonda Yoshimoto and Hong Zhang.

The writer of Arts&culture, Tim White, is an artist in his own right. Some of his works can be seen at this month’s show at the Art Foundry Gallery, at 1021 R Street. Other artists featured in the show are Laureen Landau, Gregory Kondos and Kevin McGovern. The show will be up until March 31, and a Second Saturday reception will be held March 13 at the gallery from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

White also plays music. One of his bands, Baby Grand, will be playing Friday, March 12, at Old Ironsides, at 1901 10th Street. White plays bass, and Baby Grand is fronted by his partner, Gerri Ranta, who sings and plays guitar. Baby Grand is a fine pop-music band—in the sense of creating accessible, tuneful melodies—with a sugar-sweet hard-candy crunch.

Also on that bill is Daisy Spot, the wildly original local group that features Astrud Gilberto-like vocalist Tatiana Sunderland and guitarist Mike Farrell; the group’s music fuses pop, ragtime, Brazilian tropicalia and British Invasion blues with a contemporary indie-rock sensibility. The result sounds something like old records by Os Mutantes, a 1960s Brazilian psychedelic band that was anthologized a few years ago by David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. Farrell, of course, has played with a number of local bands, and one of them, Th’ Losin Streaks, is profiled in Music.

Bart Davenport—who has nothing to do with local art or music, except that his old band the Loved Ones used to play here a lot, and that onetime Loved Ones guitarist Xan McCurdy now plays in Cake—also is on the bill. Call the club for time and cover.