When most people picture getting a tattoo, they envision a pierced-up, heavily inked dude with a tattoo gun. Sulu'ape Angela Bolson shatters that stereotype. You can find Bolson in a small room at Big City Tattoo in North Park, kneeling on a mat with her clients, strange-looking tools in-hand, with a team of female "stretchers" helping her pull a client's skin taught so she can employ the hand-tap tattoo technique. She learned the traditional art form by apprenticing for a year and a half under a hand-tap master in Western Samoa....

I didn't know I was afraid of the dark until I walked into Eric Orr's "Zero Mass," an installation on view at the La Jolla location of the Museum of Contemporary San Diego (MCASD) as part of Phenomena...

Boredom sometimes leads to magical things. A few years ago, while my hubby and I were living in Tijuana, Mexico, we had nothing to do one Sunday afternoon so we toyed with the idea of driving to Tecate on the off chance author Daniel Reveles would be sitting at Bar Diana, his favorite watering hole. Bar Diana makes several appearances in the Tecate-based author's books. The small dive bar even graces the cover of Guacamole Dip, one of his famed collections of short stories. But we thought the actual chances of running into the guy were slim, at best. ...

Stacy Dyson has skills. When she walks up to the mic, she doesn't flinch. Not an ounce of timidity is present during Dyson's poetic performances, partly because she's been doing this sort of thing for...

Our No. 1 pick of events this week is the Chicanoholics Anonymous soiree happening at Centro Cultural de la Raza on Thursday, Sept. 8.Hit play and listen to author, SDSU professor and former CityBeat ...

For the 2011 Summer Salon Series, Alexander Jarman, programs manager at the San Diego Museum of Art, put out a call to artists, musicians and performers asking them to answer one simple question: What...

Mike Maxwell's solo exhibition at Subtext shows an interesting transition. Maxwell, an artist known for his blue-faced portraits of historical figures, has begun to loosen up his tight, detailed style. He's adding brighter, psychedelic colors and allowing organic, abstract shapes to float around both in the background and foreground of his new work. "I'm letting unconscious thought take place," Maxwell tells us in this week's podcast. "....There's a looseness to it." ...

When I stopped by Lux Art Institute to see artist Claudette Schreuders, she had just finished up a Skype session with her kids and husband back in South Africa. She was noticeably shaken and she explained that this is the first time she's been away from her children for more than a few days. The mood set the tone for our podcast interview, which ended up being mostly about Close Close, Schrueders' latest series of work that, among other things, explores the tensions of being a working artist and a mom. ...

Through two full days of programming, Political Equator III will take attendees from an art gallery in San Ysidro to an informal settlement in a canyon in Tijuana. At one point, the mobile conference will even ask attendees to walk through a culvert in Smuggler's Gulch and cross from San Diego into Tijuana—for that portion of the event, you have to RSVP as soon as possible—all for the purpose of engaging participants in the "pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego–Tijuana border."...

Nuvi Mehta loves researching music and finding out all the history and interesting little factoids behind it. One night, while conducting a live musical performance, a light bulb went off and he decid...