Community Arts

The Uncertainty of Place

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) recently announced 16 arts organizations received awards in recognition of their work and for their potential continued impact on their fields.

"We’re creative, we’re affordable, and you can help us stay that way." That is Des Moines' pitch to artists as Iowa's capital grows, according to an article in City Lab.

Michael Bloom, a Fargo, North Dakota-based police officer and rapper, has partnered with Alabama-based rap artist DPB on two music videos that feature the Fargo community and showcase what community policing and creativity can achieve.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) announced its Arts Program granted $3.5M in lead funding to South Arts, based in Atlanta, GA, to launch Jazz Road, a national program designed to expand jazz artists’ touring to a wide range of communities.

Back in 2016, local Pittsburgh artists Jerome Charles and Max Gonzales were arrested for being the "Most Wanted Graffiti Artists in Pittsburgh," local media reports recall.

An article on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco scans a research commissioned by ArtPlace America that had the goal of better understanding how arts and culture can help provide solutions to public health challenges that communities (especially low-income, immigrant, rural, indigenous, and communities of color) are facing across the United States.

A friend once asked me to hang out. Remembering how long it had been since I’d last seen her, I was beyond excited to get together. It wasn’t until her response to where I resided that my excitement quickly faded. “I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?” “East Oakland.” My reply was met with an “oh…” expressing nothing but empty judgment. Now being born from the soil home to oak trees, sideshows, Kwik Way, and everything hyphy, my cultured mind couldn’t understand. I wanted so badly to reprimand her for her empty opinions based on images she saw on ABC7 news. To her, Oakland is baby Iraq.

When tasked with presenting the dynamic and multiscalar ecosystem of arts and culture in the Bay Area, the Grantmakers in the Arts team knew that we needed to call upon those engaging deeply with the forces effecting change. Given the evolving nature of space availability, access, and affordability in cities, any system of disruption will, by design, engage a diversity of stakeholders and intervene at multiple levels. From the strongly held position that the arts drive strong, vibrant, diverse communities, Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) exemplifies one such model.

I had been working the late shift at the bookstore I help manage, called Wolfman Books. We have been in downtown Oakland for four years, on this kind of rambunctious, forgotten one-way street just around the corner from city hall and Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. Beyond the storefront (or, really, inside it), we are also a small press, event space, residency program, and community arts hub.