* PUBLISHER/EDITOR’S NOTE: Weekend Santa Cruz will be on hiatus for the foreseeable future. It will not be updated for some time to come. Thank you to each of the site’s supporters.

Memorial Day marks the start of the summer season. The weather warms, the beach beckons and soon, the town empties of students and fills with tourists attracted by the area’s natural beauty and quirky charms. There are an infinite number of ways to celebrate the summer in Santa Cruz, from picnics by the lighthouse to riding the Beach Boardwalk roller coaster. As this is a finite space, we’ve pared the list to six….

PHOTO: Joshua Lau and Crystina Robinette are featured dancers in “Swing!” opening June 25 at Cabrillo Stage. Photo by Jana Marcus.

Just outside Bookshop Santa Cruz, the man in the bowler sits frozen in time and space, his hands stilled as he plays a saw. Marghe McMahon’s 1978 sculpture of local legend Tom Scribner is a landmark of Pacific Avenue. It’s also the inspiration for Richard Bennett’s “The Saw Player,” one of the 10-minute plays being performed as part of Actors’ Theatre’s 8 Tens @ Eight through February 14.

The play takes the form of an imagined conversation between a sculptress, Lee played by Anna Hinde, and her subject, Sam played by Rick Kuhn. The two connect through the process of creating an artwork.

In troubled times, artists have always stepped up to the philanthropic plate. Live Aid, Farm Aid, “We Are the World.” Maybe it’s because the arts bring hope, and those who have hope care enough to spread it around. Which brings us to the First Friday Art Tour on February 5, the scene of two very different charity efforts in Santa Cruz — one to help Haitian earthquake victims and one to help bring arts to local schools…

A photographer whose portraits of Klu Klux Klan members haunt. A set designer whose work adds character to musicals and plays. A book printer who combines old-fashioned letterpress techniques with digital tools. A woman who works in words and wax.

There are five words that link Terri Garland, William “Skip” Epperson, Felicia Rice and Daniella Woolf to one another: Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship artists. Selected works by the 2008-09 fellows are on display through March 14 at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) at The McPherson Center in downtown Santa Cruz….

(At left, William “Skip” Epperson is among the artists exhibited. Photo by r.r. jones.)

The holiday season is here, with its incessantly joyful music, lights aplenty and sparkly trimmings. But underlying the red and green, at least in America, is a swath of consumerism — the need to buy buy buy in order to give give give.

That latter sentiment led four artists to curate The $1 Burger Wars, opening December 4 at The Mill Gallery. Two-by-two paintings by more than 16 artists depicting cheeseburgers, greed and chain stores will deck the gallery walls. The pieces, two by each artist, are all for sale at the fixed price of $332.29, 32 percent less than the actual cost to produce the work….

Organic. That’s how Ann Cavanaugh, director for arts education and culture at the Corralitos Cultural Center, describes the way the Corralitos Artists Collective came into being. Artists who met during the Cultural Center’s first spaghetti dinner and art show in August clicked and decided to meet again and the Collective was born.

“There are a lot of artists in Corralitos,” Cavanaugh said of the small town located between Aptos and Watsonville, “a whole lot of people in these trees. You’d never know.”

At least 30 of those artists will be gathering November 14 and 15 for the Collective’s first-ever Harvest Festival, to be held at the Cultural Center….

For three weekends in October, artists in Santa Cruz County fling open their doors and welcome strangers into their most private spaces — their studios. Green signs dot the roadsides, proclaiming “artist” with a number and type of art.

The signs correspond with information available in the $20 artist guide and calendar offered by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, which has run the Open Studios Art Tour for the past 24 years….

Begonias subtly bloom in the clouds as The Begonia Queen, a yellow, orange and red aircraft, tows a Capitola banner over the beach town. Ruth Korch’s poster for the 57th annual Capitola Begonia Festival, held Labor Day weekend, fully captures the theme “Capitola Takes Flight.”

This is the second consecutive year the artist has won the poster competition for the festival, which celebrates the flower that put this city on the map.

Korch said the poster is “very different from what I usually do.” The idea of a plane swooping down on the shoreline came to the Santa Cruz native on a whim after ruminating on the festival’s theme….

Both Museum of Art and History curator Susan Hillhouse and Museo Eduardo Carrillo director Betsy Andersen have the same favorite story about Eduardo Carrillo, the late artist and UC Santa Cruz professor. Carrillo, each recounted separately, would wake up each morning, roll out of bed and sit at a table, painting watercolors and sketching while he had his first cup of coffee.

That passion shows in Eduardo Carrillo: Within a Cultural Context, which opened August 22 at the downtown Santa Cruz museum’s Solari Gallery. The show will be up through November 22….

At left: A detail from Eduardo Carrillo’s “Two Brothers Fighting.”

At first glance, Wende Stitt’s quilt ‘Iolani looks simple enough. A central red Hawaiian floral pattern is quilted out in white and surrounded by a white floral border. But closer scrutiny shows the border is actually appliqued handmade Hawaiian kapa (bark cloth) that mimics the center design, a commentary on Hawaiian sovereignty. The quilt won Best in Show at the Fifth Annual California Fiber Arts Exhibit, which closes Sunday (August 2) at the Santa Cruz Arts League Gallery….