LaborFest

1 week ago

‘Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages’
www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/arts-exhibits/article/fashion-painting-sculpture-fall-22375459.php
“Quantum #3” by Dewey Crumpler, from the “Entanglement” series (2026).
“Quantum #3” by Dewey Crumpler, from the “Entanglement” series (2026).
Francis Baker/Jenkins Johnson Gallery
‘Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages’
Dewey Crumpler is getting his first solo museum show in San Francisco, bringing together five decades of his painting practice with his new kinetic sculptures.
Crumpler, who lives in Oakland and was an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, has long explored larger cosmic themes in his work. Curated by Key Jo Lee, who serves as the exhibition will focus on the artist’s “investigations into Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory, and time.”
It will also present his work in conversations with other art forms including jazz, while examining Crumpler’s place in both the history of Black abstraction and the culture of the Bay Area.
“Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages” opens Sept. 30, at MoAD in conjunction with Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the museum’s annual celebration of Black art across the region.
This year, more than 58 arts organizations, galleries and creative hubs are participating, along with more than 70 Black artists and cultural leaders. Participating venues include the San Francisco Public Library, Oakland Museum of California, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Minnesota Street Project, COL Gallery, and African American Art & Culture Complex.
“Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages”: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday-Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday. Sept. 30-May 30. $7-$15. Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St., S.F. 415-358-7200. www.moadsf.org
Nexus/Black Art Week: Sept. 30-Oct. 4. Various locations throughout the Bay Area. For a full schedule, visit www.nexus-sfbay.com.
— Tony Bravo … See MoreSee Less

Museum of the African Diaspora

www.moadsf.org

Contemporary Art Museum in San Francisco | 685 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94105

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Jewish artists defend Mark Ruffalo amid Paramount’s allegations of antisemitism
www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2026-09-01/jewish-artists-defend-mark-ruffalo-a…
Mark Ruffalo wears a gray suit jacket and sits with hands clasped.
Mark Ruffalo, seen in 2023, has a leading figure in a high-profile Hollywood campaign to block the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros.(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Meg James.
By Meg James
Staff Writer

Sept. 1, 2026 11:07 AM PT

Dozens of Jewish artists are defending Mark Ruffalo after Paramount Skydance branded the actor’s criticisms about software company Oracle Corp. as “antisemitic tropes.”

Support for the actor comes as Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison has struggled to get its $111-billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger over the finish line amid considerable opposition.

Ruffalo has long been an irritant to Paramount as he is a leading figure in a high-profile Hollywood campaign to block the merger. In an Instagram post late last month, Ruffalo blasted Larry Ellison’s Texas-based software company Oracle for assisting with technology to help Israeli military efforts, including in Gaza — a conflict that Ruffalo and other progressive activists have opposed because of the killing of Palestinians.

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In an open letter, signed by more than 150 filmmakers, academics, writers and even a few rabbis, the group denounced “the outrageous smear campaign against our respected colleague Mark Ruffalo.”

“Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact,” the group wrote.

Tuesday’s letter was signed by several high-profile filmmakers, including Joel Coen, Hannah Einbinder, Tony Kushner, Lisa Cholodenko, Ilana Glazer, Frances Fisher, Todd Haynes and Sarah Kunstler.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 22: David Ellison, Chairman & CEO, Paramount Skydance speaks on stage during New York Upfront Partnership Event 2026 at Storied NYC on April 22, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount)
HOLLYWOOD INC.

Inside David Ellison’s desperate fight for Warner Bros.

Aug. 12, 2026
The group tied David Ellison’s merger ambitions to his billionaire father’s expansive network of businesses, which now include TikTok. Larry Ellison is personally guaranteeing the equity needed for Paramount to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and the family will become controlling owners of the merged entity.

However, the Hollywood merger is stalled because of an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other Democratic state attorneys general, including from New York, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon. Paramount agreed to pause the transaction until the court case can be decided.

A trial is set for March 2 in Oakland, but Paramount has been agitating for industry leaders and politicians to pressure Bonta to force a settlement that would allow the deal to go through.

“The proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery is no mere combination of two huge multinational companies,” the group wrote in the letter. “Yes, it will destroy thousands upon thousands of livelihoods. Yes, it will further consolidate the oligarchic control of our media (witness the gutting of CBS News). Yes, it will strangle competition and creativity in film and television production and distribution.”

The group painted the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger as “part of a larger project of tech-driven domination, a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting — and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors,” the group wrote.

Paramount declined to comment.

The merger fight has grown increasingly ugly in recent weeks after Paramount threatened to leave California if Bonta continued his court fight to unravel the deal. Paramount suggested it would pull up stakes from its Melrose Avenue film studio as soon as this fall.

Then, on Aug. 21, the company accused Ruffalo of injecting “antisemitic tropes” into the opposition campaign to thwart the industry-reshaping merger that would bring HBO, CBS News, CNN, TBS and the Warner Bros. and Paramount film and TV studios under the same roof.

Leaders of prominent Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League, came to Paramount’s defense, blasting the Emmy-winning actor known for playing the Hulk and roles in productions for HBO.

Hollywood, CA – June 05: Paramount Pictures studio lot at 5555 Melrose Ave. on Wednesday, June 5, 2024 in Hollywood, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
HOLLYWOOD INC.

Press freedom groups challenge Larry Ellison’s reported promise to fire CNN anchors

Ruffalo defended himself, saying he was not being antisemitic. He said he was speaking out against Oracle’s use of technology to assist Israel’s military in the war in Gaza, “what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle,” Ruffalo wrote in his post.

Paramount leaders have branded some of the opposition to the deal as “antisemitic.”

“Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism,” the group wrote in the open letter. “It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.”

The letter cited recent polls that reflect a majority of “American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide,” the group wrote. “Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too?”

Bonta abruptly canceled settlement talks last week, but extended an olive branch to Paramount by saying he would be willing to meet with the company to discuss ways to address his antitrust concerns. … See MoreSee Less

Jewish artists defend Mark Ruffalo amid Paramount's allegations of antisemitism

www.latimes.com

An open letter invokes ‘the very essence of Jewish ethical duty’ to call out connections between the Israel-Gaza war and Hollywood’s mega-merger.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

The Immigrant Workers Who Keep New York’s Restaurants Running
Food books by chefs and celebrities arrive by the landslide. “Voices From the Kitchen” highlights workers who get far less attention.
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/books/review/voices-from-the-kitchen-marc-meyer.html?searchResultPosit…

A photograph of a restaurant interior, with people seated at tables in a space with low, red ceilings.
Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
By Dwight Garner
Aug. 3, 2026

VOICES FROM THE KITCHEN: Personal Narratives From New York’s Immigrant Restaurant Workers, edited by Marc Meyer

This is a slim and modest book, a volume of oral histories in the vein of Studs Terkel’s “Working” (1974), but everyone who eats out regularly should know about it. Its title is “Voices From the Kitchen: Personal Narratives From New York’s Immigrant Restaurant Workers.” Its editor is Marc Meyer, a chef and a co-owner of the Manhattan restaurants Shuka, Cookshop, Vic’s, Shukette and Rosie’s.

Meyer’s methodology is straightforward. He sat down with 27 of his employees, many of whom have worked in his restaurants for decades, and recorded their stories on his iPhone. He transcribed the interviews and poured them with minimal editing into narratives.
Voices From the Kitchen: Personal Narratives From New York’s Immigrant Restaurant Workers.jpeg
Voices From the Kitchen: Personal Narratives From New York’s Immigrant Restaurant Workers

These men and women came from all over the globe — Ecuador, Bangladesh, Peru, Egypt, Mexico, the Ivory Coast, Bosnia, the Dominican Republic, Gambia — and their accounts of getting here, and scratching out lives in New York City, are plucky, harrowing, moving and often very funny. They’ve lately become anonymous political targets, and “Voices From the Kitchen” gives them back their human faces.

It’s possible to be cynical about Meyer’s project, and he’s aware of that. An obvious power dynamic is at play: No one is going to tell the entire gnarly truth about their lives, and especially about their jobs, to their employer. And Meyer is aware of whatever “white savior” vibe might cling to such a project.

It’s possible to hold those things in mind and admire “Voices From the Kitchen.” (All proceeds go to the narrators, and they’ve retained legal ownership over their stories.) Food titles arrive by the landslide in bookstores, yet so few dig into the lives of the immigrants who work in the back of the house as dishwashers, bussers and prep cooks, and increasingly in the front as servers and captains. More than a few by now are head chefs and managers.

Stories like these haven’t gone entirely uncollected. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the American Folklife Center and other organizations have assiduously compiled food-related oral histories you can find online. But it’s good to have these accounts between hard covers. “Voices From the Kitchen” is intrepid and timely enough to make you optimistic that someone will compile a more expansive book in this vein, not limited to the workers in one restaurant group.

Most of the men and women here came from small towns. Many had absent or abusive fathers, and no access to real educations. They fled to America to help support their families back home, to escape gang violence and corrupt governments, and to attempt to seize a part of what can only be called the American dream. Many had relatives who’d already come to New York.

The arrival stories are intense: days in the desert with little food or water, thieving coyotes (human smugglers), random gunmen, terrifying river crossings and long trips while packed “like cookies” into heavy trucks meant for hauling liquids, with few air vents. Many felt they would not survive. One rode to New York from Los Angeles in the back of a watermelon truck.
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All started at, or near, the very bottom: cleaning bathrooms, bussing tables, working coat checks. All rose — first to a bit of prep work, then to a salad station, and so on — through hard work, thrift and perseverance. These are what we used to call, long before America’s descent into the ICE age, Horatio Alger stories.

Part of the pleasure of this book is following these men and women as they move between restaurants, assiduously climbing the ladder. There’s a built-in nostalgia factor in clocking the names of these places, some long gone and some standing: Big Kahuna, Ocean Grill, Red Gravy, Le Zoo, Clyde Frazier’s, Jean Georges, Mercer Kitchen, Momofuku Ssam Bar, Ernie’s, Lil’ Frankies, Bayamo, Poiret, Brown Betty, Avanti, Danji, Seventh Avenue Donuts, Charlie Bird, Calle Doa, Veranda, Fraunces Tavern, Sequoia, Maestro’s Steakhouse, Upland, Danube, A Voce Columbus, Aqualis Grill, Bayamo.

Not so long ago, most restaurant work was considered menial labor. Thanks in large part to Anthony Bourdain, it has become admired and cool (if still brutal) work. People want to look and be like chefs: raffish, tattooed, blunt, forearm scorch marks on display. The job offers intense camaraderie. It is a backdoor gateway to all manner of culture, in a way that most other blue-collar professions are not, should one wish to step through that gate.

A not-untypical story here is that of Vico (Meyer uses first names only, and sometimes pseudonyms), who arrived from a small village in Mexico in 1986 and started in restaurants as a porter. He’s now married and has been a United States citizen for eight years. He runs his own well-regarded restaurant, La Flor, in Queens, and oversees more than 20 restaurants in the Bowery restaurant group.

Vico’s daughter graduated from Amherst College. Another interviewee, Angel, also from a small town in Mexico (his father was a truck driver), is now a chef who has a son at Phillips Exeter Academy.

The book cover of "Voices From the Kitchen: Personal Narratives From New York's Immigrant Restaurant Workers."
The women in this book express feeling pressure to prove themselves in a male-dominated profession. They feel as squeezed as tubes of tomato paste between work and family. Some have been sexually abused. But more than a few have risen to the top. Carlha, whose father was a fisherman in the Dominican Republic, came here at age 6. She’s a chef and manager at Shuka.

Not all of these stories are happy. Some interviewees are depressed or have other health problems. “This city can give you economic stability, but it cannot give you emotional stability,” one says. Some merely want to go home to places that don’t quite exist any longer. “Why didn’t I stay?” another asks, about his hometown in Mexico. “I think I lost something from the past, and it’s gone forever. I can’t get it back.”

These interviews come most alive when narrators break the harmonious aura, when you sense someone scraping away at the pith. One woman admits that waiting tables too long can burn you out and make you snippy. Another remarks that working in diners sucks because so many are owned by big Greek families. Everyone in the family has an opinion, so you get it coming and going.

Rare comments like these remind you of the limitations of “Voices From the Kitchen.” Because these narrators are speaking to their boss, the underside of kitchen work is rarely on display — the rude customers, billing mistakes, racism, restroom hookups and cleanups, blood blisters on your feet, ego collisions, having to “push” menu items, trips and falls, the flameouts of co-workers, mandatory last-minute shifts, clearing away gross, half-eaten meals, tipping agonistes, cuts and punctures, dealing with celebrities and V.I.P.’s, cramped and noisy environments — everything that goes on below the deceptively smooth front-of-house choreography.

There is a more honest and encompassing oral history project out there, waiting to be compiled. Editors, start your engines.

I know about this book because I had lunch at Cookshop a few months ago, and copies were on the host’s table. It was a good find. Some of these stories are so tangled and involving they could be made into films.

This is not an explicitly political book. It has nothing concrete to say about immigration policy. It does not argue for wide-open borders. But it complicates easy narratives and asks that we see people not merely for what they are but for what they might become.

“They read my name and saw my face and pointed to the dishes,” says the job-seeking narrator of one of the stories in Bryan Washington’s collection, “Lot” (2019). This is surely happening daily in New York City restaurants. “Voices From the Kitchen” is an optimistic book — it reminds you that if many restaurant careers begin that way, they don’t have to end there. … See MoreSee Less

The Immigrant Workers Who Keep New York’s Restaurants Running

www.nytimes.com

Food books by chefs and celebrities arrive by the landslide. “Voices From the Kitchen” highlights workers who get far less attention.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Fight & Win: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, 1934
hardballpress.squarespace.com/store/p/fight-win-minneapolis-teamsters-strike-1934?inventory-produ…
In the depths of the Depression, with hungry, desperate man begging for jobs, a Teamsters Local with 175 members decided to take on the Minneapolis business community’s rabid anti-union Association.

Growing rapidly to a militant force of committed workers 5,000 strong, they battled the cops, the hired thugs and the union-busting politicians. Some battles were bloody, all of them were fraught with danger.

Never backing down, IBT Local 574 eventually broke the grip of the business community, making Minneapolis a union town and inspiring union organizing across the Midwest.

Author John Hanson recalls the stories his father told him about those heroic men and women and the fight to establish a democratic union. His is a poignant, personal story that speaks a universal language of courage and justice. … See MoreSee Less

Fight & Win: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, 1934 — Hard Ball Press

hardballpress.squarespace.com

In the depths of the Depression, with hungry, desperate man begging for jobs, a Teamsters Local with 175 members decided to take on the Minneapolis business community’s rabid anti-union Association….

LaborFest

4 weeks ago

Gold Rush era comes alive in waterfront celebration of SF history
www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/embarcadero-event-brings-sf-history-to-life-in-landmark-pier/ar…
By James Salazar | Examiner staff writer Aug 16, 2026

The San Francisco Historium will transform Pier 35 into two historical areas: an 1850s-era town square and an outdoor shipyard.
Courtesy Rich Yee

A variety show, ship tours and cuisine tastings are among the offerings bringing California Gold Rush-era history to life as part of a two-day interactive exhibit.

Red Barn Productions, the event company that hosts the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair in Daly City, is teaming up with the San Francisco Historical Society to create the San Francisco Historium Spotlight.

More than 50,000 square feet of Pier 35 on The Embarcadero will be transformed into two historical areas: an 1850s-era town square and an outdoor shipyard. Those spaces will be filled with miners, sailors, merchants, craftspeople and other characters sharing stories of how people came together to shape The City.

The San Francisco Historium will run Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Over the course of the weekend, guests can hear live performances from local artists, sample delicacies and beverages from eight vendors, play games and activities, and shop at a market highlighting artisans and makers.

Organizers said the inaugural extravaganza is allowing The City to commemorate those who helped build what was then a small waterfront settlement.

“Many people aren’t interested in history because they think it just presents facts about the past, when in fact, if done right, history is storytelling at its best — a vivid show into events that shaped communities,” said SFHS Deputy Director Lana Costantini.

Performers portraying historical figures associated with The City will be roaming Pier 35 and sharing insightful tidbits with attendees, according to organizers.

The lineup includes Mark Twain — who did not make the comment commonly attributed to him about our frigid summer climate — and Joshua Abraham Norton, a Gold Rush-era businessman who declared himself emperor of the U.S. in 1859 and is now remembered as “Emperor Norton.”

Mary Ellen Pleasant, a millionaire who used her money to invest in the Underground Railroad, is also scheduled to make an appearance.

The Historium will also highlight The City’s maritime beginnings and its role as the West Coast’s center of 19th-century maritime trade. It will offer tours of the 132-foot-long, two-masted sailing ship known as the Matthew Turner.

Owned by the Sausalito nonprofit Call of the Sea, the brigantine was modeled after the Galilee, a ship built in the 1800s by designer and builder Matthew Turner. … See MoreSee Less

Two-day event brings SF history to life

www.sfexaminer.com

San Francisco Historium Spotlight offers glimpse of The City during the Gold Rush.