Juan Aguilera, ink and acrylic on paper, 22x30" If there is an ideal Friday this month to hop across the Bay and explore the thriving Downtown Oakland neighborhoods your friends have been prattling on about, it is this one – always the first one. From 6 – 9pm, a slew of galleries will open their doors for Oakland Art Murmur ’s monthly art walk. Full of dogged self-starters and no home for the risk-averse, the Oakland gallery scene routinely welcomes work that the more cosmopolitan corners of the SF circuit are prone to overlook. Here are four picks from the East Bay’s ever-growing frontier. Out of the Blue Blue somehow achieves a power beyond its pigment, carrying a serene glumness, sorrow or anguish in its tone. The blues expressed a more particular anguish – that belonging to African Americans in the Deep South around the turn of the 20th century. The blues also employed a succinct narrative grip and improvisational flare that came to define a century of American music m
