Culture Report: A Bread Factory’s Rising Future

Architect James Brown has taken over the old Cramer’s Bakery building in Logan Heights for an art, architecture and event project he’s calling Bread and Salt.

Save the date and plan to join us at Bread and Salt on Thursday, March 14, for our fifth arts-and-culture-focused “Meeting of the Minds.” We’ll have more details in the coming weeks.

The Bread and Salt vision includes a couple dozen residences where artists could live and work, gallery spaces and a café. The U-T San Diego has the story of the century-old factory’s beginnings, including a pretty funny defense of white bread the Evening Tribune ran in the 1930s.

Here’s a great photo gallery from the U-T that shows some of the places in the factory where time seems to have stood still.

You’re reading the Culture Report, our weekly compilation of the region’s arts and culture news.

Local Roots

• Justin Timberlake gave an interview about practicing, storytelling and the timelessness of Marvin Gaye to two high-schoolers, one of them from San Diego, who participated in a Grammy high-school camp. They started by asking why he’d given them the time. “Because I like talking to people who love music,” Timberlake replied. (Rolling Stone)

• Makeda Dread has boosted music, and especially Jamaican and African music, in San Diego for more than 40 years. She started the World Beat Center, now in Balboa Park, in the early 1990s. (U-T)

• An anthropology professor at San Diego State compiled a list of the 20 top rock concerts the university has hosted over the years — Buffalo Springfield, Madonna and Patti Smith among them. Many of those musicians and acts would’ve seen an Aztec mural painted between the green room and the stage in the Backdoor venue. The professor, Seth Maillos, is working to save that mural and remount it. Maillos will present a lecture about many of those shows on Thursday.

• Lindsey Jacobellis, a Snowboard Cross champion and Olympic silver medalist who fell during competition in the 2010 Olympics, takes LA Observed on a video tour of her life near the beach in Encinitas.

• Local artist James Hubbell’s sculpture show is open at the Oceanside Museum of Art, and the U-T’s Pam Kragen asked the octogenarian artist his favorite material to sculpt with:

“That’s like asking me what’s my favorite food,” he said. “First I come up with the idea and then once I have it, I know whether it’s going to be in iron or wood or something else. Every medium has its own gifts to give you.”

• Institutions in Balboa Park have more than a dozen jobs open. Among them, the San Diego Museum of Art is hiring two community artists.

Happening Here

• Experimental theater troupe Circle Circle dot dot is unfolding a love story play in the places you might have seen ones unfold in real life: A wine bar, a café, on the street in Hillcrest. The troupe’s leaders tell KPBS about staging a play in unconventional places.

• The “kiss” statue’s permanent version is here and is being installed this week. (Port of San Diego)

The U-T’s got a photo gallery of the giant statue being moved by a crane.

• A music recording studio in Pacific Beach got its name out among local bands by recording for free for several months. But CityBeat’s Peter Holslin found the deal sparked criticism from some other music professionals who’ve lost business to the newcomer.

• Diversionary Theatre takes a flying leap at love in “Birds of a Feather,” which U-T critic Pam Kragen gave a positive review. “Inspired by the real-life relationships of gay penguins and straight red-tailed hawks in New York’s Central Park, it shows that no species, gender or sexuality has all the answers in the thorny quest for love,” she writes.

• For its fifth year next year, Art San Diego Contemporary Art Fair is moving to a cooler month: November. A heat wave last September proved problematic for the fair’s organizers. (U-T)

• More than 40 locally based artists will show their work in a former parachute factory downtown this weekend. Street artist Exist 1981 posted a time-lapse of the making of a mural for the show.

• Cecut, or the Tijuana Cultural Center, has a new director, Pedro Ochoa Palacio. He’s spent the last 11 years at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego as a cultural liaison. (U-T)

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Kelly Bennett is a reporter for VOSD. You can reach her directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531. Or you can keep up with her on Twitter @kellyrbennett or on Facebook.