The BASEBALL RELIQUARY Inc.
TOUCHING ALL BASES: A BASEBALL CELEBRATION
The Baseball Reliquary and Pasadena
Public Library present Touching All
Bases: A Baseball Celebration, on
Friday, October 9, 2009, from 6:00-10:00 pm,
at the Pasadena Central Library, 285 E.
Walnut St., Pasadena, California. The
programming is presented in conjunction with
ArtNight Pasadena, the city’s biannual
collaborative project celebrating art and
culture. This multi-cultural and
multi-generational evening will incorporate
visual art, music, performance, literature,
and moving image media to provide new
insights into America’s national pastime and
to explore its unparalleled creative
possibilities. Admission is free.
A variety of visual art presentations
will run throughout the evening from
6:00-10:00 pm. The library’s North Entrance
display cases will feature 35 paintings by
Ben Sakoguchi from his ongoing
Orange Crate
Label Series: The Unauthorized History of
Baseball.
Born in San
Bernardino in 1938, Sakoguchi taught in the
Art Department at Pasadena City College for
many years until his 1997 retirement. In
over four decades as a professional artist,
Sakoguchi has shown his work in numerous
solo and group exhibitions, primarily at
schools, museums, and other nonprofit venues
within the United States. He has been
awarded two National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships and was a recipient of a
Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual
Artists in 2005-2006. In 2004, Sakoguchi
began a dedicated look at how baseball has
reflected American culture through a series
of small paintings done in the style of
orange crate labels. His Orange Crate
Label Series: The Unauthorized History of
Baseball currently numbers over 200
paintings.
A display in the Main Hall will feature Tina Hoggatt’s Eight Ballplayers from the Negro Leagues, a collection of prints and drawings of legendary African-American players in the years before the integration of baseball. Utilizing the linocut printmaking technique and foundry type, Hoggatt’s extraordinary portraits date to 1987 and include Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Ray Dandridge, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, Satchel Paige, and Willie Wells. Hoggatt’s artworks are in the collection of the Pasadena Public Library. On view in the Technology Learning Center and projected on a screen in the Main Hall will be historic photographs and oral history excerpts from the Latino Baseball History Project: The Southern California Experience, a collaborative effort between the Baseball Reliquary and the John M. Pfau Library at California State University San Bernardino. The multi-faceted project is documenting and interpreting the central role baseball has played in the social and cultural histories of Southern California’s Latino communities. When fully implemented, the project will include an archive at the John M. Pfau Library, oral history documentation conducted by students at several universities, traveling exhibitions, a Web site, and related activities. The Latino Baseball History Project‘s ArtNight Pasadena media production is being coordinated by project committee member M. Malia Vincent-Finney, Founder, CEO, and President of the Haili Wailele Film/Arts Foundation and The Living Museum of California Indian Cultures.
A highlight of the evening will be
performances and moving image media
presentations in the library’s Donald R.
Wright Auditorium. Dan Kwong will present
his solo performances, Secrets of the
Samurai Centerfielder and Dodgertown.
Kwong is an award-winning multimedia
performance artist and playwright who has
been presenting his solo work nationally and
internationally since 1989. His work
combines personal stories with historical
context (and a generous sense of humor) to
explore the many facets of identity. The
significance of his body of work is
acknowledged in A History of Asian
American Theatre (E. Kim, Cambridge
Univ. Press), as well as his instrumental
role in nurturing the next generation of
Asian American solo performers through his
performance workshops. His book From
Inner Worlds to Outer Space: The Multimedia
Performances of Dan Kwong (Univ. of
Michigan Press) was published in 2004. He
has performed with Great Leap since 1990 and
serves as Project Director of their
Collaboratory mentorship program. Kwong is a
Resident Artist at 18th Street Arts Center
in Santa Monica and is a graduate of the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 8:00-9:00 pm in the DRW
Auditorium, Dan Einstein, Television
Archivist at the UCLA Film and Television
Archive, will present a couple of Dodger
"diamonds" from its prestigious holdings.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one
of the largest collections of moving image
media materials in the world, and the
largest held by any university. Its vaults
hold more than 250,000 motion picture and
television titles as well as 27 million feet
of newsreel film that combined presents an
all-encompassing documentation of the 20th
century and beyond. The Archive is
internationally renowned for its pioneering
efforts to preserve and showcase moving
image media and is dedicated to ensuring
that the history of our time, captured
through moving images, is explored and
enjoyed for generations to come.
From 9:00-10:00 pm in the DRW
Auditorium, Jon Leonoudakis, a native San
Franciscan, baseball fan, and filmmaker
based in Los Angeles, will introduce a
screening of his new 30-minute documentary,
5:04 p.m.: A First Person Account of the
1989 World Series Earthquake Game. What
if you were a baseball fan whose dream was
to see his team play in a World Series game?
And after 30 years of waiting, you finally
got to that game, only to have it
interrupted by a 7.1 earthquake? This is the
story of the 1989 World Series Earthquake
Game, a first-hand account from Jon
Leonoudakis, a die-hard fan of the San
Francisco Giants who set out to document his
once-in-a-lifetime experience at the World
Series with a VHS camcorder and a still
camera. The tale evolves from a provincial
experience involving two local baseball
teams (the Giants and Oakland A’s) in the
sport’s penultimate contest, as Leonoudakis
interviews fans in the parking lot before
the game. Then, in fifteen seconds, the
story takes a radical left turn into chaos
and tragedy, and explodes into an historic
and international event. And standing in the
middle of it all is a baseball fan with a
camera. Twenty years later, Leonoudakis
revisits the story, featuring his original
video footage, photographs, and perspective
as one who participated in the entire
experience. The documentary is flecked with
encounters of the human spirit and reunites
the filmmaker with a stranded fan he helped
rescue in the tension-filled aftermath of
the quake in Candlestick Park’s parking lot.
Los Angeles folk singer and baseball
balladeer Ross Altman, best known for
writing songs that comfort the afflicted,
and afflict the comfortable, has carried on
the tradition of protest songs popularized
by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan,
and Peter, Paul and Mary. He will present
two performances of his original baseball
songs in the Humanities Wing from 7:15-7:45
pm, and again from 9:15-9:45 pm.
Poets Michael C Ford and Holly Prado
will present two readings of their baseball
poems and memoirs in the Humanities Wing
from 6:15-6:45 pm, and again from 8:15-8:45
pm. |