Crafted from recycled materials, Ma Li’s dream-like sculptures celebrate individual freedom, imagination and play. In Ma Li’s hands, clear plastic bottles transform into suspended fields of jellyfish-like sculptures, and colored foam and clothes hangers resemble migrating flocks of birds. With references to Chinese history, ecological concerns, ritual and fantasy, the Bay Area-based visual and performance artist weaves unlikely materials into large-scale immersive environments, and brings...

Painter, graphic designer, illustrator, sculptor and stereo photographer Rene Garcia Jr. has been re-imagining popular art in many different ways, but it's his large format sculptural glitter paintings that have gotten the most attention recently. Reproducing such things as retro ads and celebrity photos in glitter, Garcia's photorealistic pieces can take over 100 hours to complete. Spark visits him in his dazzling studio that any grade school class would envy.

Passion for the art of dance is perhaps the defining quality of Oakland's Ronn Guidi, director of the Oakland Ballet Academy and founder of the famous Oakland Ballet. An ever-energetic mainstay of the East Bay dance scene, Guidi created the Oakland Ballet in 1965 and led the small regional company to international attention in the 1970s with his canny choices of repertoire. After 33 years at the helm of the Oakland Ballet, Guidi retired from the company in 1998, to be succeeded by Karen...

San Francisco writer, performer and playwright Dan Hoyle set off in a Ford E-150 conversion van on a three-month-long summer journey into America's heartland to discover just what -- and who -- lies between the liberal-leaning cultures of the East and West coasts. Hoyle, a Fulbright scholar and son of well-known Bay Area circus performer Geoff Hoyle, shares with Spark what he found during his rambling adventure across some 20 states. Hoyle's travels through countless small towns and the...

Meet San Francisco political cartoonist Mark Fiore, who quit his job at a daily newspaper to experiment with a new format -- animated political cartoons for the web.

See how Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Fiore finds his inspiration for his weekly political online animation.

The Fisher Collection of Contemporary Art is widely considered to be one of the most impressive private art collections in the world. Beginning in June 2010, a preview entitled Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection debuts in a major exhibition during a three-month presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Calder to Warhol is culled from the more than 1,100 works collected over four decades by Doris and the late Donald Fisher, founders of Gap.

Art figures into the work scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer creates at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in more ways than one. Commissioned by the San Francisco museum to write the Torah, Judaism's sacred text, from beginning to end using scribal techniques and traditions passed down for thousands of years, Seltzer must follow strict rules governing the document's production. And she faces the added challenge of completing the lengthy spiritual practice in plain view of museum visitors...

In this segment, we follow choreographer Jacinta Vlach and saxophonist Howard Wiley as they start work on a new dance theater production about San Francisco's Fillmore District. "The Fillmore Project" is a tribute to the cultural legacy of the neighborhood once known as "The Harlem of the West."

Although Marin landscape artist Daniel McCormick often exhibits his works of earth art in galleries, the natural place for his organic sculptures is in the wild, where the graceful forms find a home clinging to the edges of creek banks and gullies, gradually subsuming themselves into the existing environment. Spark follows McCormick as he works on an installation in the John West Fork of Olema Creek, in Marin -- a prime spawning ground for endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout.

Decidedly unsilent, the San Francisco Mime Troupe's gadfly theater, played for free in city parks and spaces, has long defined a distinctly San Francisco brand of experimental theater. Spark talks with actors Ed Holmes, Michael Sullivan, and Velina Brown in Dolores Park as the San Francisco Mime Troupe gets ready for a 2009 performance of "Too Big to Fail" during their 50th anniversary season.

In an age of lightning-fast and celebrity-obsessed media, a time when a single subject can be photographed and transmitted around the world in mere moments, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado stands out. Not only does the celebrated documentary photographer eschew commercial subjects for socially charged images of humans and landscapes shaped by socioeconomic and environmental injustice, but also he routinely devotes years to his projects, which often comprise hundreds of...

Sorting out the complexities of racism in 60 minutes might seem an impossible proposition, but that's exactly the challenge San Francisco comedian W. Kamau Bell undertakes in his one-man show, The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour. Spark visits Bell to discuss race and check out his show.

Spark visits Richard Mayhew at his home studio outside Santa Cruz, California, in 2009. During this time, his work is appearing concurrently at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the de Saisset Museum of Santa Clara as part of a three-part retrospective tracing his career chronologically from the 1950s onward. His work is featured in the permanent collections of such museums as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian...

Instead of glamorous hotspots, famous faces and iconic structures, Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout prefers just the opposite. Rather than the latest and greatest venues du jour and the throngs that flock to them, Westerhout has built a career on creating large-scale images which capture the empty places long since forgotten by the general public -- including abandoned hospitals, churches, and theaters. "I've been photographing in abandoned buildings for about 12 years now,...

The free-spirited passion of neo-Romanticism remains alive at Mary Sano's Studio of Duncan Dancing, where Sano passes on the work and teaching of the great early-20th-century modern dancer Isadora Duncan. Spark follows Sano as her company prepares for its 10th-anniversary performances and as she passes on the legacy of Isadora Duncan to a new generation of dancers.

For more than 20 years, the Jewish Music Festival has brought eclectic music from every corner of the Jewish diaspora to Bay Area audiences. For their 23rd annual event, festival director Ellie Shapiro has commissioned nine artists from Israel, Ukraine, New York, New Orleans and the Bay Area to create groundbreaking new Jewish music -- and they only have six days to do it. While the festival is underway, the musicians hole up in the basement of a divinity school in the Berkeley hills. On the...

Master ceramicist and singer-songwriter Ron Nagle claims to have little patience. But to anyone familiar with the painstakingly rendered, diminutive forms he has become best known for over the last three decades, impatience seems an unlikely quality to ascribe the San Francisco artist. As Spark catches up with him, Nagle is hard at work on his first new album in 30 years, with songwriting partner Scott Mathews.

Transgender performer Sean Dorsey brings stories of his own struggles with gender and sexuality to the stage, making them accessible to a wider audience. Spark visits with Dorsey while he works on "Lost/Found." For this work, Dorsey uses journal entries, memoirs and letters culled from the trans and queer community to piece together a narrative in which he fantasizes about the normal childhood he might have had if he was born a boy

Pianist Rebeca Mauleón grew up in San Francisco listening to Carlos Santana. When she started playing professionally in her early twenties, Mauleón performed and recorded with some of the luminaries of Latin and jazz including Tito Puente, Israel "Cachao" Lopez, even Santana himself. Today, she's a prolific player, composer, and arranger, but she does more than create music. Mauleón is a musicologist and author, having written several texts on Latin music technique, including the Salsa...

Spark follows the Hijos del Sol crew as they finish up a mural for a group called Healthy Start, which provides social services to immigrant families in East Salinas. The mural is full of vibrant colors and symbolic images. The focus is on the family and the most striking image is of a mother letting her child go so that he may soar over the fields of strawberries. Like many immigrant children, Jose Ortiz had trouble adjusting to living in new country when his family moved the United States...

Fletcher Benton moved from a small town in Ohio to San Francisco in the late 1950s to pursue his dream of becoming a painter, yet found success as a sculptor. In the 1960s he began experimenting with kinetic sculpture, or art that moves. It was the golden age of kinetic art, and Benton's colorful sculptures made of metal and plastic won him accolades from the art world. Spark visits Benton in his sculpture studio, and at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara during their exhibits "Flashing...

A dirty kitchen, a motionless man watching a flock of birds taking flight, a woman disappearing around the corner of a motel building -- these are the kinds of seemingly mundane scenes photographer Henry Wessel has been capturing since the 1960s. But under his careful hand and watchful eye, these scenes are transformed into unique and unforgettable images of life in the American West, and in California in particular, that led the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to launch a major...

Ann Hamilton's eight-story tower, built on the grounds of the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, Calif., is more than just a work of art to be observed. With its cylindrical walls, staggered windows, open ceiling and winding stairways, the space also serves as a unique venue for performance art. Spark visits with Hamilton and Meredith Monk for the unveiling of "The Tower."

With a body of work noted for its pulsing athleticism and intelligent composition, Benjamin Levy has become one of the Bay Area's most sought-after choreographers, creating a style marked by personal inspiration distilled into pure movement. In his 2007 work tentatively called "Bone Lines," Levy translates into dance the story of his own family, Persian Jewish immigrants who fled Iran during the religious revolution of the 1970s. Levy brings Spark inside the process of creating this piece...