Community Arts

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.

When I first got to Oakland, I didn’t know where I was. I gave the cabbie who picked me up at the Emeryville Amtrak station an address on Apgar Street. The house where he dropped me off, near 40th and Market, within walking distance of the MacArthur BART station, was where I lived for my first year in California.

The place where my mother met my father, West Oakland’s Esther’s Orbit Lounge, is long shuttered now. The cultural and social institutions that sprang up along Seventh Street made the moment feel like “Harlem of the West.” There is a storied existence in Oakland. It is buried over by unaffordable luxury apartments and gutted out of once black-owned row houses and Victorian homes. When I chose to be a writer, I didn’t know I was choosing to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, and hero.

Today, Regina’s Door in Oakland serves as a healing artistic space for survivors of sex trafficking, as well as a launching pad for theatrical productions featuring the stories and performances of survivors. Its start came in 2014, when Regina Evans decided she needed to do something to help her community. “We have young girls being brutalized every day. In Oakland trafficking is very hidden, but if you go down International Boulevard, you also see very young girls — twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and you know they’re being raped,” she said.

Northwestern University performance studies professor and department chair Ramón H. Rivera-Servera initiated an outreach initiative, with the support of The Andrew Mellon Foundation, to assist Puerto Rican artists in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria.

After the state of Florida dropped its funding to only $2.65 million for all arts organizations statewide (a dramatic decrease from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs’ recommendation of more than $41.6 million), a Tampa foundation seeks to sustain local arts organizations as they're facing catastrophic effects from the cuts in funding.

Arts and cultural organizations in the United States are well-distributed across the country, serving communities both poor and affluent, rural and urban, not just on the coasts and not just in major metropolitan markets, states the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) introducing its 2018 most vibrant arts communities in America index.

The Civic Practice Partnership is the Metropolitan Museum's new collaborative residency program for New York artists committed to social change.

The arts and culture sector continues to have conversations on multiple levels about how to advance the causes of equity, inclusion, and diversity. The discussion is not new, but the momentum toward implementing clear action steps is building. A new level of understanding of the ways in which racial and social inequities are the result of complex systemic issues has given rise to a realization that the path to truly effective solutions will require deep, and deeply challenging, institutional change.

As arts funders, we know that extensive research has shown that the presence of arts and culture activities at the neighborhood level can improve health and safety and promote a sense of well-being among residents. But how do we identify what activities already exist in a community and, as important, where there are gaps so we can be proactive in advancing a community’s livability?