One of Sacramento’s successful native daughters had a homecoming this week — almost 90 years overdue. Long before Greta Gerwig or Brie Larson, there was Betty Inada, a Japanese American jazz singer who sought fame in Japan in a time when American screens and stages had little space for Asian women. On May 14 at the Sofia theater, the Sacramento Asian Pacific Film Festival screened her 1936 film “Whispering Sidewalks,” which offers a glimpse into Japan’s nascent jazz scene and Inada’s mercurial

At the opening celebration of the “California Is in the Heart” exhibit at the California Museum in Sacramento Oct. 29, an elderly woman in a wheelchair drew close to a glass case. It contained a photograph of her late husband, Aquio “Allen” S. Dawang, with several of the medals he earned during his time with the U.S. Army’s First Filipino Infantry Regiment “L” Company during World War II.

At Twisted Track Gallery in Sacramento, which recently emerged as a keystone of the thriving R Street art scene, one wall is devoted to a triptych of the feminine divine. In three oil paintings, figures swathed in frills and lace stand against backdrops of fire and smoke, their skirts sheltering creatures in greener worlds: foxes, toucans, a ray wreathed in seaweed.

April is Photography Month in Sacramento, an annual celebration launched by the Midtown nonprofit Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in 2018. Around the Capital Region, galleries, museums and businesses are displaying the work of local artists like award-winning bee photographer Kathy Keatley Garvey, street and portrait photographer David Kalb, abstract photographer Nick Shepard and more.

After two quiet years, downtown Sacramento’s Cesar Chavez Park is again thumping with music and crowds on warm Friday evenings. The Concerts in the Park series is back through July 29, bringing local and national musical artists to the stage in the shadow of City Hall.

Even if you’ve never heard of Roseville-based artist Nancy Sayavong, her art feels familiar. Her sculptural and two-dimensional work references the shapes and structures of the home — a place that, for many, has felt all but inescapable over the past two years.

Then the music started, and it was as though all the color and warmth that had seeped out of Skagaströnd came to settle in that room.

On June 15, 1896, the Woodland Opera House, built in 1885 as the first opera house in the Sacramento Valley, opened its doors for the first time since a fire destroyed the building four years earlier. On June 15, 2021 — 125 years later to the day — the theater reopened after another crisis.

From outside the blocky building it shares with the local library, Safnahús Borgarfjarðar passes as the kind of low-tech local museum one finds in any small town around the world. You know the type—glass cabinets full of staid-faced porcelain dolls, phased-out farm tools, empty eggshells arranged by species—the dust-coated debris of obsolescence.

June Steckler began to observe the world like an artist when she was 5 years old.

Less than a week before Filipino dancer and multimedia artist Ehrlich Ocampo’s final performance in Skagaströnd, a village in northern Iceland that hosts the Nes Artist Residency, the season’s first snowstorm blasted through town like an air raid.

Marvin has remade the hotel in his own image, shaping it around his love of art, fashion and community while paying homage to his Filipino roots. With an in-house gallery, a curated shop and space for events, it has become ”a platform for artists, cyclists, passionate people generally,” Marvin said during a conversation in the hotel’s courtyard, lush with potted palms and bougainvilleas.

Outside the Hyatt Regency in downtown Sacramento, tower cranes rise above the skyline, harbingers of the city's burgeoning building boom. Inside, the designers who are determining the new face of the city took to the runway to imagine our future -- through fashion.

You may have thought about buying organic during your pregnancy. After all, there's evidence to suggest that dangerous chemicals involved in conventionally-grown produce can be harmful to foetuses. There's even more evidence advising that organic products are better for the environment.