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50 Events and Tours Featured in Bay Area Science Festival

Published

11 years ago

October 22, 2014

Judy Sakanari’s lab receives and studies over a thousand worms a week. These aren’t your garden-variety slimers: her lab studies nematodes, flatworms and other parasites that cause debilitating diseases around the world. Some are so tiny you need a microscope to see them; they can enter human skin and worm their way into the brain.

Sakanari, PhD, is opening her lab for a public tour as a part of the Bay Area Science Festival (BASF) on Sunday, Oct. 26 at 2 p.m. The parasite lab tour is first come, first served, and it’s limited to 20 people total. It’s one of many free tours offered as a part of the festival’s Explorer Days.

Judy Sakanari, PhD

The 10-day festival runs from Oct. 23 to Nov. 1 and includes over 50 events for families, adults and children, ranging from science storytelling competitions to concerts to interactive tours with scientists to lectures on current science topics. This year marks the 4th annual Bay Area Science Festival, which was created by the Bay Area’s scientific, cultural, and educational institutions, including Science & Health Education Partnership (SEP) at UCSF.

In a cramped, windowless room with a biohazard sign on the door, Sakanari pulls out a petri dish containing several reddish snails. These inconspicuous creatures are the host for part of a life cycle for the parasite Schistosoma, which causes Katayama fever and can lead to liver damage, kidney failure, and more.

After Sakanari warms the snails under a lamp to mimic sunshine, soon microscopic, wriggling larvae scoot across the water.

“This is one that causes over 200 million infections worldwide, so it’s a very prevalent infection and causes chronic disability,” said Sakanari. “For a lot of parasitic infections, the infection may not be fatal right away, but the parasite can cause chronic disease that makes people disabled for many years.”

Visitors to the lab can peer through the microscope to check out the wriggling larvae. Sakanari shows how the tiny parasitic larvae have evolved to seek out human hosts: she smudges a tiny bit of oil from her finger into a dish, then adds the water with larvae. They squirm over to the invisible smudge, seeking out the human lipids like a missile.

Next stop in the lab tour: the Worminator. This nondescript black box is helping the scientists to test the effectiveness of different drugs on various worms, including onchocerca worms that live in black flies and cause River Blindness.

This disease can cause intense itching, rashes, eye lesions, and ultimately can progress to blindness. The lab is also testing drugs on Brugia worms, which are transmitted by mosquitoes and cause elephantiasis, a painful disease that can cause enlargement of the legs and arms.

Sakanari’s lab tech Christina Bulman pulls out a plastic case with rows of circular wells, each containing a long slippery worm not much fatter than a human hair. She places the case inside the Worminator, and then an image of the squirming worms shows on the computer screen.

Using software written by Sakanari’s former student, Chris Marcellino, the Worminator actually measures the speed of the worms’ movement, and the researchers use this to test how effective various drugs are at slowing or killing the disease-causing worms.

Visitors to the parasite lab can see these and other microscopic monsters on the hour-long tour on Sunday. Adults and supervised children are welcome on the lab tour.

Packed with family, child and adult events, the Bay Area Science Festival runs from Oct. 23 to Nov. 1. For a festival calendar, go to www.bayareascience.org/schedule/2014-10/?PageSpeed=noscript

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Black Artists in America, Installation Three Wraps at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens

TRI-STATE DEFENDER — With 50+ paintings, sculptures and assemblages, the exhibit features artists like Varnette Honeywood from Los Angeles, whose pieces appeared in Bill Coby’s private collection (before they were auctioned off) and on “The Cosby Show.” Also included are works by Alonzo Davis, another Los Angeles artist who opened one of the first galleries there where Black Artists could exhibit.

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March 24, 2026

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By Candace A. Gray | Tri-State Defender

The tulips gleefully greet those who enter the gates at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens on an almost spring day. More than 650,000 bulbs of various hues are currently on display. And they are truly breathtaking.

Inside the gallery, and equally as breathtaking, is the “Black Artists in America, From the Bicentennial to September 11” exhibit, which runs through Sunday, March 29. This is the third installment of a three-part series that started years ago and illustrates part of the Black experience through visual arts in the 20th century.

“This story picks up where part two left off,’’ said Kevin Sharp, the Linda W. and S. Herbert Rhea director for the Dixon. “This era is when we really start to see the emergence of these important Black artists’ agency and freedom shine through. They start to say and express what they want to, and it was a really beautiful time.”

With 50+ paintings, sculptures and assemblages, the exhibit features artists like Varnette Honeywood from Los Angeles, whose pieces appeared in Bill Coby’s private collection (before they were auctioned off) and on “The Cosby Show.” Also included are works by Alonzo Davis, another Los Angeles artist who opened one of the first galleries there where Black Artists could exhibit.

“Though [Davis] was from LA, he actually lived in Memphis for a decade,” said Sharp. “He was a dean at Memphis College of Art, and later opened the first gallery in New York owned and operated by black curators.”

Another featured artist is former NFL player, Ernie Barnes. His work is distinctive. Where have you seen one of his most popular paintings, Sugar Shack? On the end scene and credits of the hit show “Good Times.” His piece Saturday Night, Durham, North Carolina, 1974 is in this collection.

Memphis native James Little’s “The War Baby: The Triptych” is among more than 50 works featured in “Black Artists in America, From the Bicentennial to September 11” at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, the final installment of a three-part series highlighting the impact and evolution of Black artists through 2011.

The exhibit features other artists with Memphis ties, including abstract painter James Little, who was raised in a segregated Memphis and attended Memphis Academy of Art (before it was Memphis College of Art). He later moved to New York, became a teacher and an internationally acclaimed fixture in the art world in 2022 when he was named a Whitney Biennial selected artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Other artists like Romare Bearden, who had a Southern experience but lived up North, were featured in all three installments.

“During this period of time, he was a major figure,” said Sharp. “He wrote one of the first books on the history of African American art during a time when there were more Black academics, art teachers, more Black everything!”

Speaking of Black educators, Sharp said the head curator behind this tri-part series and Dixon’s partner in the arts is Earnestine Jenkins, Ph.D., an art history professor at the University of Memphis, who also earned a Master of Arts degree from Memphis State University (now UofM). “We began working with Dr. Jenkins in 2018,” he said.

Sharp explained that it takes a team of curators, registrars, counterparts at other museums, and more, about three years to assemble an exhibit like this. It came together quite seamlessly, he added. Each room conjured up more jaw-dropping “wows” than the one before it. Each piece worked with the others to tell the story of Black people and their collective experience during this time period.

One of the last artists about whom Sharp shared information was Bettye Saar, who will turn 100 years old this year. She’s been working in Los Angeles for 80 years and is finally getting her due. Her medium is collages or assemblages, and an incredible work of hers is on display. She’s married to an artist and has two daughters, also artists.

The exhibit catalogue bears some of these artists’ stories, among other scholarly information.

The exhibit, presented by the Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions, is culturally and colorfully rich. It is a must see and admission to the Dixon is free.

Visit https://www.dixon.org/ to learn more.

Fun Facts: An original James Little design lives in the flooring of the basketball court at Tom Lee Park, and he makes and mixes his own paint colors.