For over 40 years, East Bay Open Studios has provided an excellent opportunity for art lovers, collectors, and just the plain nosy who maybe want to see inside their neighbor's spaces.
This year, more than 200 Bay Area artists are included in its catalogue of self-guided tours that can take you all over the East Bay—Berkeley, Pinole, El Cerrito, Livermore, Oakland, and beyond. Everything kicks off on Friday, June 2, at Oakland's historic 16th Street train station with a party and an exhibition of some 100 artists (the soiree is invite-only, but all you have to do is join EBOS to get on the list).
Artist spaces will be open from 11am to 6pm the following two weekends (June 10-11 and June 17-18), and activities at each venue will be determined by the artist. You might encounter light snacks and wine, demos, live music, and opportunities to chat with painters, collagists, and sculptors one-on-one. To get you started, here are nine artists who caught our fancy.
Happy Together, Betsy Kendall
Visitors to painter Betsy Kendall's studio will find new landscapes, canvases of live model paintings, and her latest oil series featuring her quizzical pet birds —the canvases are super tiny to highlight their small bodies in an outsized world. "My earliest inspiration came from looking at living things. My mother showed me clever little plants, pretty rocks, goldfish in our garden in Japan," the artist recounts. "I try to capture the bliss of living." // 408 West Richmond Ave., Point Richmond





























