Emma SanCartier Illustration

With a thriving creative community, it's unsurprising that San Francisco's craftspeople and artists have also taken to the Internet to promote and sell their creations. Etsy alone is home to thousands of handmade products, many hailing from the Bay Area. However, the result is often like a thrift store -- it can require a lot of time and patience to pick through a lot of crap (or more importantly, overpriced crap) to find the really well-crafted gems. So in order to take the guesswork out of your valiant attempts to support artists, here is your weekly dose of shops by locals.

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Maggie Preston

Come out and show some love for the youngest and brightest up-and-coming artists and performers at the Second Annual San Francisco Youth Arts Summit. Youth leaders from prominent San Francisco advocacy groups have joined forces to showcase young artists' works which spans all realms of artistic expression.

See also:

Video of the Day: Laser Mazes, Giant Robots, and SMS-Driven Cops and Robbers

The Art of Macworld

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DEADLINE EXTENDED TO WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 5 at 5pm.

Connected in San Francisco: What's your interpretation?

This is a city of connections. Big bridges, little phones, unusual cultures. San Francisco lives for this stuff. Draw us some stories about how it all fits together.

We are looking for local artists to give us their take on this theme!

The best entries will be selected to appear in print.

Submissions should be created as true sequential art - a full story unto itself. Cartoonists are encouraged to be creative within the confines of the required dimensions. There are no restrictions on the number of panels or how you arrange them.

Be sure to work within our half- or quarter-page sizes. If you would like to do a full-page comic, please submit a proposal via email prior to producing it.

Guidelines

• Submissions must be in black and white. You may propose full color, but you must demonstrate competency in this before it will be green-lighted.
• If coloring with tones of gray, separate grays by 15 percent, i.e. 15, 30, 45, 60, 85 percent grays.
• Grayscale images: 300 dpi.
• Bitmapped black-and-white images: 600dpi

• Submit your entry with the following contact information:

• Your full legal name
• The name you prefer to be credited in print
• Your website, if applicable
• Comics must conform to one of the sizes listed in the PDF download below

Size & Compensation

Items selected for print will be compensated based on size. Please download the PDF for specifications and more info.

SFMOMA never ceases to impress. Great art exhibits, friendly staff, and an excellent coffee shop. If that's not enough to make you a fan, it even has free admission on the first Tuesday of every month -- all that, and it's right in the heart of downtown San Francisco. We know lots of our readers will be out and about in downtown shopping over the holidays, but when you get worn out from all that bargain hunting, stop by the SFMOMA cafe to grab a coffee and check out "The Lab."

See also:

Recent Acquisitions: A Decade Later, SFMOMA Gets What It Wants

SFMOMA Expansion Aims to Redefine Role of Museum in the City

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Gil Riego Junior

The city's newest photo collective, SFstop, formed entirely of current or former SF State photographers, is holding its first gallery show Sunday at Akiba Cafe. The free show will include works from 10 S.F. State students/alumni, and showcases moments stolen from some of the city's brightest characters, like "Bush Man," but also some of its unsung heroes through the power of some good ol' San Francisco street photography.

See also: 

Renegade Mannequin Installation at the de Young Asks: What Is Art?

Video of the Day: Flugtag, Human-Powered Flying Machines

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Wendy MacNaughton

Despite being one of the oldest San Francisco neighborhoods, Dogpatch, the half-residential, half-industrial enclave along the eastern waterfront, is also one that is perpetually undergoing transition. Escaping both the 1906 earthquake and fires that ravaged the city and the dot-com development boom, Dogpatch remains an enigmatic locale to most.

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Lee Miller died of cancer, overweight, alcoholic, ravaged by depression, and tortured by her husband's affair with a trapeze artist. Anyone meeting Lee Miller then would have been surprised to know that she was once considered the most beautiful woman in the world, second only to Greta Garbo. A former Vogue model and muse/lover to Man Ray, Miller was also famous for cavorting in Hitler's bathtub.

Courtesy of the Legion of Honor

These tragic details are not in evidence at the "Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism" exhibit currently at the Legion of Honor. What is discussed is her struggle to be an artist in her own right. As a photographer she helped discover the Sabatier Effect, a process of development that edges out the lines of the subject in ethereal shadows. According to her, it was an accidental discovery caused by a mouse running over her foot in the dark room. She was an artist and also a photo journalist. She was the only woman allowed to be a combat photographer during WWII. She is quoted as saying to a reporter, "It seems to me that women have a bigger chance at success in photography than men ... Women are quicker and more adaptable than men. And I think they have an intuition that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men."

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A few weeks ago, Japanese Master Potter Akio Nukaga -- basically a ceramics god in Japan -- held a pottery-throwing demonstration to kick off the arrival of his exhibition, "Very New Work," to Heath Ceramics San Francisco. Nukaga works in the 200-year-old tradition of Kasama, a region in Japan known for its rich ceramic history. We don't know much about centuries-long traditions of vase and cup making, but watching it sure is hypnotic. Watch Nukaga make a tea cup using what looks like 90 percent magic (and then watch it again, and again and again), after the jump.

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Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Elizabeth Mitchell had to have it.

The curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs was far from Palo Alto when she spotted something truly extraordinary in Manhattan. Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) produced over 300 prints in his lifetime, but this was altogether different. Not only is Man and Woman one of Tamayo's earliest prints, but it's also one of his strongest.

Mitchell knew that Stanford's Cantor Center for Visual Arts already owned a few works by Tamayo, but they were color lithographs from the 1960s or later. While the black and white woodcut, measuring roughly 10 by 10 inches, will be an ideal addition to an exhibition planned for 2015, the curator is specifically interested in Mexican works on paper, as well as art by the Americans they influence.

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During the last Summer Games, nearly 70 million Americans watched Shanghai's opening ceremony - it was an impressive if somewhat eerie phantasm (a gymnast ran on air, the weather was controlled by scientists, and a little girl was given a "suitable" face to match her voice). More »