OMCA celebrates local culture and community.

The art of Zsuzsanna Laszlo expresses the painter’s emotions.

Long after the picnic blankets have been cleared, the boats have docked, and the joggers have mostly headed home, there’s often a light burning inside the office of Oakland Parks Supervisor Tora Rocha, where she watches over the crown jewel under her charge—The Gardens at Lake Merritt, a seven-acre oasis of themed gardens on Lake Merritt’s north shore.

Blues music plays softly in Wendy Lee Gadzuk’s East Oakland studio, packed with well-worn and comfy furniture, rock memorabilia, a three-legged cat, and the raw materials of her mixed-media assemblages: animal remains, a bag of baby doll heads, old jewelry, and hardware she scavenged from furniture discarded by the roadside, stripped with a screwdriver kept in her purse for just that purpose.

Chris Rummell stands behind the counter at St. Vincent de Paul’s Redux Studios & Gallery in Alameda in his signature Buddy Holly glasses, a long way from the dairy farm and sawmill on which he grew up in Northeast Ohio.

Long after the picnic blankets have been cleared, the boats have docked, and the joggers have mostly headed home, there’s often a light burning inside the office of Oakland Parks Supervisor Tora Rocha, where she watches over the crown jewel under her charge—The Gardens at Lake Merritt, a seven-acre oasis of themed gardens on Lake Merritt’s north shore.

Blues music plays softly in Wendy Lee Gadzuk’s East Oakland studio, packed with well-worn and comfy furniture, rock memorabilia, a three-legged cat, and the raw materials of her mixed-media assemblages: animal remains, a bag of baby doll heads, old jewelry, and hardware she scavenged from furniture discarded by the roadside, stripped with a screwdriver kept in her purse for just that purpose.

Wood sanders buzz and power tools whir wildly as the USS Hornet hulks in the distance and a vision of the San Francisco skyline shimmers outside a warehouse on Alameda’s former Navy base. Inside, furniture maker and designer Florian Roeper casts the mold for the bronze metal legs of a commanding dining table, his latest commission.

It all started with a devil space monkey.