We lost the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin August 16 (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018). We also lost Kofi Annan (8 April 1938 to 18 August 2018), 7th United Nations Secretary General and the first from Subsaharan African to lead the International organization. When we think about black woman and their navigation of public spaces, we remember the recent deaths of Nia Wilson (18) and Jessica St. Louis (26), who were not safe when they should have been #sayhername
Alice Walker & Desert Rose Celebrate World Peace Day with One Life Institute
Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart: An Evening with Alice Walker & Desert Rose is at First Congregational Church of Oakland, Fri, September 21, 7:30 p.m.-10:00 p.m., 2501 Harrison Street, Oakland. For tickets visit: https://www.onelifeinstitute.org/workshops-events
Ms. Walker says, “In this time of sorrow, when so many are reeling from the pain of earth loss, of beauty’s destruction, of oppression and challenge of every sort, I have felt encouraged and spiritually supported by the music of Desert Rose. I encountered them in Cape Town, South Africa in 2011, when they lent their message of harmony and peace to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, in which I was participating. They have an indelible sound that reaches very deep. It is a joy to welcome them to Oakland.”
Listen to an interview with Rev. Liza and Desert Rose on Wanda’s Picks, Sept. 12, 2018: http://tobtr.com/10965175
Happy 70th Birthday Linda Tillery
Ms. Tillery is celebrating 70 with a new CD, “A Mighty World,” at Freight & Salvage, Sept. 7, 8 p.m. & Sat., Sept. 8, 8 p.m. She is joined by a few of her favorite artists: Eric Bibb, Ruth Davies, Brett “Jailbait” Brandstatt, Venezuelan Music Project, Kugelplex and/or Hills to Hollers. Each night is a different line-up and MC. Rhodessa Jones on Saturday, Diane Amos on Friday. The Freight is located at 2020 Addison Street, Berkeley, (510) 644-2020. Visit https://www.thefreight.org/
Bay Area Now: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 25
Bay Area Now 8, Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s signature triennial, is the only survey exhibition of its kind in Northern California. Featuring 25 artists, architects, and designers, among them: Andre Wilson, Darell W. Fields, Woody D. Othello and NEMESTUDIO, the exhibition showcases a broad range of creative practices, including painting, photography, ceramics, textiles, video installation, and digital media. For the first time in its history, Bay Area Now also includes architects and designers working at the leading edge of environmental, landscape, and housing design. Bay Area Now 8 Opening Night Party, Fri., Sept. 7, 7PM, $12 in advance. YBCA is located at 701 Mission Street in San Francisco. For information call: 415-978-2700 or visit ybca.org
2018 Black-Eyed Pea Festival
The Black Eyed Peas Festival is Saturday, September 15, from 11 am to 6 pm at Oakland Technical 
High School, 4351 Broadway, Oakland. The event is FREE. This year’s festival features Awon Ohun Omnira (of course) and Harpist from the ‘Hood Destiny Muhammad, The Jamming Nachos and Fua Dia Congo. Dimensions Dance Theatre and veterans MJs Brass Boppers are returning, plus the headliner, the Fabulous Miss Faye Carol. Liten to an interview on Wanda’s Picks Radio Show, Sept. 12, 2018.
Theatre
Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf @ African American Shakespeare Company at the Taube Atrium Theater, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco, Sat.-Sun. through Sept. 15-29. Two shows on Saturday. Visit https://coloredgirls.brownpapertickets.com/
9-1-1 What’s Your Emergency? World Premiere
La Peña Cultural Center is proud to present the world premiere of 9-1-1 What’s Your Emergency? On Sat., Sept. 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm. Written and directed by Bay Area playwright Jovelyn Richards and starring a cast of local actors, the play is an artistic response to gentrification, stereotypes. Written and directed by Bay Area playwright Jovelyn Richards and starring a cast of local actors, the play is an artistic response to gentrification, stereotypes, systemic racism and the personal narratives of humanity. La Peña is located at 3105 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.
9-1-1 What’s Your Emergency? is a groundbreaking and timely work that examines white fragility, as a result of the intersection of White Supremacy and personal psychological narratives, propelling the calls. The 9-1-1 call is rooted in micro-aggression, yet can have irreparable consequences to communities of color. Poetic justice will be served in this court drama based on real life 911 calls. The show is for adults 18 years and up.
Stick around after the play for a community discussion with the actors and organizations fighting for racial justice, especially as it pertains to the 9-1-1 calls that have run rampantly throughout the country. Tickets are: $20 Advance and $25 at the door which opens at 6:30 pm.
Maafa Awareness Month 2018
Maafa Commemoration San Francisco Bay Area is Sunday, October 7, at Ocean Beach, Fulton at the Great Highway. This 23rd year in Sept. and October we will interrogate violence against black women and black female safety in public places looking at recent Nia Wilson (18) and Latifa Wilson’s (26) stabbing and the death of Jessica St. Louis her body found at the East Dublin BART. Certain policies make it easy for black women to be targets for racial and gender violence, like releasing women from Santa Rita at 1:30 a.m. when BART has stopped and there are no buses.
How do we protect her? There will be a teach-in September 23, 6-8 p.m. at The Lab, 2948 16th Street in San Francisco, simultaneous poetry readings in October and a Rosa Park’s-style BART strike on Black Friday in November. Stay tuned. If you want to help call W. Sabir: 510-255-5579 and leave a message. We need help organizing the various events Bay Area-wide. We are also interested in connecting and supporting community activities in October which promote black well-ness and black well-being. Get in touch so we can create a calendar.
Black Politics—it would be great to host a forum in October to discuss the Nov. State and Local ballots as well as candidates. Let me know if anything is happening so we can let people know.
Art
The Black Woman is God: Assembly of Gods opens Thursday, August 30, 2018 7:00 PM and 
continues through Tuesday, October 2, 2018 12:00 AM at SOMarts, 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco.
In its third iteration, the Black Woman is God (BWIG) co-curated by Karen Seneferu and Melorra Green now includes a visual conversation with Black men. The conversation also includes this year, galleries and programs in the East Bay. Too many to list one should not miss the opening or closing at SOMArts, the artist talk Sept. 15, 1-4 p.m., at SOMarts; the BWIG in Oakland at the People of Color Sangha at the East Bay Meditation Center, Sept. 27. Also in Oakland, the BWIG meets S. Carolina at the Thelma Harris Gallery, Queen Afua is in town Sept. 1-2 in Oakland. Visit http://www.theblackwomanisgod.com/ and plot it out (smile).
The Black Woman is God not only as an exhibition, but a movement-building platform that explores the intersections of race and gender, dismantling racist and patriarchal notions that devalue Black women’s contributions to society. Visit Wanda’s Picks Radio Show and listen to a recent conversation with co-curator Karen Seneferu, Idris Hassan and Ayana.
Freight & Salvage at 50
Mavis Staples headlines the 50 Anniversary Gala for Freight and Salvage, Wed, Sept. 12, 8:15 p.m. Later this month, The Freight hosts its first ever Music Festival, Sept. 22, 11-6 p.m. There will be stages on Shattuck, Milvia at the Berkeley Rep across the street and inside the venue itself at 2020 Addison Street in Berkeley. It the Freight’s gift to the Berkeley community. Imagine, it all started “in a used furniture store at 1827 San Pablo Avenue. It opened as a 87-seat coffee house in June 1968. The Freights motto is: “music builds community.” Visit thefreight.org/
On the Fly:
SF Green Festival is Sept. 6-14 is free for students with ID, joins the Global Climate Action Summit, Sept. 12-14. An extra day was added, Sept. 14, 3-8 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Crime + Punishment, dir. by Stephen Maing, Executive Produced by Laura Poitras is at the Roxie, Aug. 31. It is also available online at Hulu.com The film follows the story of the NYPD12, 12 black and Latino officers who filed a class action suit against the department for unfairly profiling certain citizens based on race. Officers had to fill quotas with certain populations or their performance records and opportunities for advancement were affected; Pan African Festival, Sunday, Sept. 2, 10 AM-8 PM at Mosswood Park, Broadway at MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland. Visit panafricanfest.com; Festac Oakland Preservation-Arts-Culture-History Festival in Old Oakland kicks off Friday, August 31, 7-10 PM, at the Washington Inn, 495 10th Street and continues Sat., Sept. 1, 12 noon to 10 p.m. Visit www.theoaklandcannery.com Movies to see: Blindspotting, Blackkklansman and Sorry to Bother You.
Theatre
The War of Roses at Cal Shakes through Sept. 15
Read review commentary: http://wandasabir.blogspot.com/2018/09/cal-shakes-presents-war-of-roses.html
Dr. David Blackwell Hall Opens at UC Berkeley
At a historic time when monuments dedicated to the legacy of criminals are being toppled, it is refreshing that UC Berkeley is honoring Dr. David Blackwell, the first tenured African American faculty (1954-1988). The new structure, a dorm at Bancroft Way and Dana Street opened this fall in time to “ease the housing crunch of [752] undergraduates. The building has commercial space on its first floor and also houses Stiles Hall, a community center for students [of color]” (Kane). The dedication is Sept. 11, 12-3 p.m. at 2401 Durant Avenue. The opening of the new building at a time when Black student enrollment is down, while Black faculty hiring is up, is an ironic twist (Goldman).
Dr. Blackwell’s friend and age mate Dr. Albert H. Bowker, who would eventually become chancellor at Berkeley in 1971, says in his introduction to Blackwell’s oral history at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, conducted by Nadine Wilmot in 2002-2003: “David’s remarkable career was established at a time when prejudice ruled in academia. We salute him for his persistence and human courage as well as for his great scholarly achievements” which are many (4).
“He has done fundamental work in game theory, Bayesian inference, and information theory. He was a principal developer of Bellman’s dynamic programming ideas. He founded the theory of comparison of experiments, later developed by his colleague Lucien Le Cam to become one of the central tenets of mathematical statistics. With Arrow and Girshick he developed the backward induction method of solving sequential decision problems to solve the problem of determining Bayes solutions to such problems. He is the author of the classic book, ‘Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions,” along with some eighty papers in professional journals.’”
Blackwell’s academic achievement began in a small railroad town of Centralia, Illinois, where his 
parents and teachers cultivated his genius and sent him the University of Illinois at Urbana at 16, where he excelled, graduating with his Ph.D. at 22. The graduate knew he wanted to begin a career in education and so he applied to all the historic black colleges and universities, assuming no white institutions would hire him. This assumption would prove correct for a number of years.
While teaching at Howard University, Blackwell traveled to the west coast as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley, also Stanford where Dr. Bowker taught. Blackwell was recruited by UC in 1941, however, he didn’t get the position. Ten years later, Berkeley courted him again, the time then a bit more politically ready for an African American scholar who chaired the newly created statistics department 1957-1961. He would be a part of the institution for 50 years.
Blackwell loved his graduate and undergraduate students and was effective in multiple guises: advocate, as Dean in the College of Arts and Letters, as doctoral advisor and as classroom instructor. The mathematician was able to make complex statistical theories and theorems accessible to his students over his teaching career. “He was a distinguished researcher who independently invented dynamic programming, a statistical method still used today in finance and areas like genome analysis. That invention, and his development of a fundamental theorem still underpinning modern statistics, helped propel Blackwell, in 1965, to be the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and later in 1968 he was the first to be elected to the Academy of Sciences (Kane & Bowker).
Arif Khatib, Founder and President Emeritus of the African American Sports Hall of Fame recalls the building’s ground breaking tribute a few years ago. “The statisticians spoke highly of him. 75-100 people were in attendance. They were all white. Then and now, there were not a lot of people who can match him. He stood alone, he stood out. I used to visit with him regularly at home. He would tell me, ‘stop by, I like talking to you.’ I’d reply: I like talking to you too. We had good times together. His wife was a principal of a school. They were two educational giants.”
How many buildings are dedicated to black intellectuals on the UC Berkeley campus?
“It’s a beautiful building on Dana @Durant,” Mr. Khatib stated. “The other end fronts Bancroft—The David Blackwell Building of Science and Math. I am so proud to be an African American who knew this man. Can you hear students say, ‘I am staying in the David Blackwell Building.’ I want to see a photo of Dr. Blackwell in the hall. It doesn’t have to be a statue, so when students walk into the building they see the image of this power Black man.”
Sadly, but sildenafil best price the pancreas does not have self-healing. It also improves sensation cipla sildenafil in genitals. After the treatment you will get the erection and hardening of gentile organ which in turn giver way order discount viagra check over here to this condition as a large number of highly processed foods in the market contain carcinogenic substances. I have incorporated methods such as meditation, hypnosis, massage and order cheap cialis cranial sacral work. National Prison Strike
From August 21-Sept. 9 across the nation, prisoners and their supporters are honoring the National Strike called by the organizers of the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March in Washington, DC, 2017. Precipitated by the April 15 events in at Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in South Carolina, where seven prisoners lost their lives and many others were injured in the overcrowded institution. Listen to Mama Efia Nwangaza, Human Rights Activist, MXGR, talk about the events on Wanda’s Picks Radio (8/24 http://tobtr.com/10947799). She was also the featured speaker at the Oakland Black August Event in Oakland last month.
Sat., August 26, a rally was held at San Quentin. The prison officials wanted to shift the rally attended by 100s to the less trafficked road near the entrance gate. However, organizers resisted and there we were on Francisco Blvd. parked buses and cars doubled parked along the service road leading into the prison rear gate as cars traveled to and from US 101 honking their horns in support as prison strike allies waved signs.
Comrade George Jackson’s attorney Stephen Mitchell Bingham commented that cars honking and people in such numbers supporting the Prison Strike was a sign of new times he wanted to witness. He said that in 1971 Marin County was a hostile place and there was no support for the Prison Movement and abolition policies. Bingham had to leave the country and go underground when accused of smuggling a gun into the prison inside his tape recorder. Today, he noted with appreciation, the Prison Movement has an audible audience outside.
At the Rally, the people read the National Demands together loudly which are:
Immediate improvements to the conditions and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned women and men, along with an end to prison slave labor—work without reasonable pay, pay that reflects the prevailing wage should cease.
Other demands (3) look at “rescinding the litigation reform act which allows imprisoned persons to address grievances and the violation of their rights.”
The 4-6 demands are an immediate end to racial over sentencing, overcharging and parole denials of black and brown people, and an end to the racist gang enhancement policies.
No. 7 is to make rehabilitation programs available to all prisoners, especially those labeled “violent offenders.” The list (8-10) concludes with the demand for more funding for rehabilitation services in state prisons, reinstatement of Pell grants for higher education costs, and the reinstatement of voting rights for all confined citizens serving prison terms, pretrial detainees and so-called ex-felons. Representation is demanded. All voices count! Visit http://sawarimi.org/national-prison-strike https://incarceratedworkers.org/campaigns/prison-strike-2018
The strike comes during Black August, a time when prisoners and their supporters reflect on the historic blood-shed this month as well as successful resistance movements launched like that in Ayiti or Haiti against the French. The Strike, called by the organizers of the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March in Washington, DC, 2017, begins on the date Comrade George was killed at San Quentin and ends the day the Attica Rebellion started. To stay abreast of events and actions visit
Other speakers at SQ included Nube Brown, Prisoners Human Rights Coalition, CA and California Prison Focus, Jeremy Miller from the Idriss Shelley Foundation, and Jill McLemore, the mother of an incarcerated man. Bilal Ali Mafundi, coordinator of the Bay Area National Prison Strike Solidarity Committee, hosted. Liberated Lens Media Collective documented the event. To watch, visit: https://youtu.be/vvmVrLT-V58
Three Black Films
The National Prison Strike Aug. 21-Sept. 9 with George Jackson’s killing at San Quentin and the related Attica Rebellion bookending the call which went out on April 15, following the extrajudicial killing of seven prisoners and injuring 22 at the Lee County Prison “riot” in South Carolina where seven men suffered multiple stab wounds and bled to death according to The Greenville News. The violence began about 7:15 p.m. and lasted over 7 hours. The box office presence of these three films: 
“Blindspotting,” “Blackkklansman” and “Sorry to Bother You” raise important questions about law enforcement and the prison system. The films all interrogate judicial fairness and/or prison as slave plantations, prisoners as cheap labor and the traps baited with incentives average citizens fall into or are pushed by economic circumstances.
The films look at the way law enforcement treats black men/black people, how all the laws governing justice apply to “just-us” or white citizens. This is especially true in Spike Lee & Jordan Peele’s “BlacKkKlansman“ based on the true story of undercover Police Detective Ron Stallworth (actor John David Washington) who with his white counterpart, Flip Zimmerman (actor Adam Driver), infiltrate the Colorado branch of the racist organization, Klu Klux Klan. This idea of two Americas and two systems of justice is also true in “Blindspotting” when a policeman shoots a black man in the back and his act is still seen as justifiable homicide.
The psychological two-ness or social-schizophrenia, W.E.B. DuBois famously isolates as indicative of black survival is brilliantly explicated in the two roles: Ron Stallworth and Flip Zimmerman. Stallworth’s whiteness goes literally undercover. It is not as easy for his blackness to be Zimmerman’s undercover persona. Even white Jews have trouble pretending to be black. Released on the anniversary of Charlottesville, the film ties the events in 1970 with now. The explosive conclusion shows how wired the rest of the world is to concepts that objectify and isolate. Actress Laura Harrier’s Patrice is a nod to all the unnamed and named black revolutionary sisters (many at the academy) who stood their ground, guns cocked with the brothers. Harrier’s Patrice is an uncompromising leader in the Black Student organization that the Colorado police are watching.
The government sees the student organization’s ideas of black power as anti-white establishment and therefore dangerous. Funny how anti-black life police conduct is not seen as equally dangerous. It is great seeing Harry Belafonte in the film as a Mr. Turrentine, a Civil Rights legend. “The 10 August release date also coincides with the beginning of James Fields Jr’s trial, the man Lee refers to as ‘the motherfucker psychopath who plows his car down through a crowded street and killed Heather Heyer’ [in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August] (Guardian).
In “Blindspotting“, Collin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal) black/white brothers, we see another case of two-ness. Casal’s Miles wants to be black, however, his “blackness” is a caricature of the reality, a reality no one believes is true except him. Miles is just playing “dress-up.” Everyone knows he is in costume except him. We see the white man in the room, yet he does not see how he is breaking the China. He is a liability, yet doesn’t recognize the harm he causes Collin, more importantly, he doesn’t see how his blindness puts his black child and the child’s mother, at risk. Collin enables the behavior, even accepts it without acknowledging the aberration. His friend is his enemy. Miles is as bad as the cop Colin sees shooting the black pedestrian in the back as he flees, yet Colin misses the analogy and the smoking gun in his “friend’s” hand.
It is a powerful film about displacement, not just physical displacement. “Blindspotting” externalizes the wandering ghosts in West Oakland that once occupied the many homes the Collin and Miles empty for new owners. The men work for a moving truck. In one scene Collin where the owner tells them to take the house contents and throw them away, Colin takes a moment to look at the photo album left behind with furniture and other keepsakes. The theatre audience wonders with him why such happy people left their treasures for strangers discard.
“Blindspotting” asks: what happens to the psyche when home is no longer your home. Collin is paroled into a half-way house where his every move is scripted. When he complains, the plantation overseer tells him he is there because he broke the law. Collin knows he does not want to go back to jail and has nowhere to go, so he straightens up. Everyone is tired of him — his mother (played by the stunning Margo Hall) has given away his room. His girlfriend, Val (Janina Gavankar), is also tired of Miles whose presence puts Collin at risk.
Klansman takes the theme of racism and supposed white supremacy and looks at how black women are impacted. Do white police give black women the same protection offered white women? Klansman also looks at white women and their supportive and just as deadly roles in the racist organization. The US release date of 10 August also coincides with the beginning of James Fields Jr’s trial, the man Lee refers to as “the motherfucker psychopath who plows his car down through a crowded street and killed Heather Heyer” (Guardian).
Of the three films, Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” features, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a black artist intent on dismantling the system. Again, as in Black Klansman, the artist is a woman. Cassius ‘Cash’ Green’s (actor Lakeith Stanfield) girlfriend has inflexible principles which clash with his. She tells him she is not sleeping with a sell-out. It is the same for Collin (in “Blindspotting”), his former girlfriend, Val, cannot condone behavior which by association could potentially bring her harm.
Cash is search for value. He might have the name, but his value is declining or at least he thinks it is—and “perception” (what we think) trumps reality, right? Cash finds a job as a telemarketer and once he channels his white voice, the voice that people trust, the voice that makes the sell—he excels. Initially Cash just wants to impress his Detroit who is doing important work—Cash acknowledges this.
Detroit challenges and disrupts the dominate system one personified by the corporation Worryfree which encourages consumers to voluntarily join the chain gang, let the state take care of their needs. A performance artist, Detroit sets up visual queries that provide alternatives to normalized behaviors. Visually, “Sorry to Bother” you is stunning for the art, for the colors, for the amazing cross-section of people.
Cash is also apolitical; he just wants the money, so he can move out of his uncle’s garage. “Sorry to Bother You” asks Cash(ites) to think about the collective and how his pursuit of capital without thinking about how the money or wealth is generated endangers who he loves.
“Sorry to Bother You” takes its audience down a road none have traveled before. It is so absurd, even surreal the folks I was riding with a couple weeks ago were rendered speechless. Boots’s first feature is a gumbo filled with all kinds of yaya—some flavors familiar, others unusual. Trust the cook. It just takes getting used to the way Boots stirs the pot. Let the ideas simmer before adding camouflaging catsup. A highlight of this film are the beautiful shots of Oakland and the cameos and presence of some of the Bay’s celebrities like Danny Glover’s “Langston,” who hips the new telemarketer to the “white voice phenomena,” a picture of artist entrepreneur, Keba Conte whom Cash pins on his vision board; W. Kamau Bell and Eric Arnold, to name a few.
The white voice sells product. Cash adopts the voice and the voice becomes him to the point he forgets to turn it off. How do the black men who “make it” or do well on these jobs survive when their lives are a projection of an audience’s fantasy? As the protagonist learns in “Sorry to Bother You,” the worker is at risk who allows himself to be isolated. To be effective against a system that commodifies labor and its production—people, “Sorry to Bother You” says if we are to survive, we have to organize. The film is cautionary.
The next time the phone rings unsolicited and you do not recognize the number, don’t pick it up.
FESTAC Cultural Arts Festival 2018 in Oakland
San Leandro Street is a wide thoroughfare that is not pedestrian friendly— Large trucks fly, bounce alongside cars and motorbikes to commercial destinations. Newly erected barriers near Coliseum BART make it safer to bike and walk as streets wait nearby for holes to be paved or covered over. Nonetheless, this strip of virgin territory is home to what was once a place of commerce, jobs and hope. Historic for a number of reasons, the Cannery Building near Seminary Avenue is perhaps a singular vestige of that moment when Oakland prospered if one measures prosperity in economic growth and development for all.
Arthur Monroe is a man with vision. He’s an Abstract Expressionist artist from Brooklyn, where he established the first in the nation – a designated live-work spaces for artists called AIR or Artists in Residence. Later when he relocated to San Francisco, where he served on the Art Commission he saw the empty Cannery building as an opportunity to develop something similar on the west coast.
The term “live-work” is Arthur Monroe’s coinage. Monroe’s initial rent was about $100 a month. He recruited other artist friends to also take up residence in this spot now in 2018 is 30 artists strong. Not all visual artists, some of the residents are writers, musicians, performance and mixed media artists. The facility also has rent control. Monroe remembers when he had a ten year lease. Tall bookshelves reach to high ceiling where supplies sit in crates. Other book shelves lines the hallway, a large piano sits in the larger center room where there is a table with refrigerator, stove and cabinets for dishes and cutlery. Large skylight windows brighten the room—newer florescent lights cover what were more skylights. In the studio even postcards have a story. Tacked to the door, he tells me about Miles hand shaped like a musical signature. The bathroom has photos of Malcolm X with Fidel Castro. . . .
Back to the studio there are several drawing tables, Monroe built himself with art on them, easels stacked upright are also in the room which has several works the artist is still interrogating. He shows me a painting that is several years old he recently pulled out to work on, while a black canvas with a few patches of brown waits expectantly for its turn (smile). When Douglas Stewart and I arrive at Monroe’s door an August Saturday afternoon, he is in his studio. I feel badly for the distraction our presence causes, but Arthur is happy to see us, especially me, whom he hasn’t seen in many years.
Arthur Monroe is perhaps best known as the West Coast representative of the Festival of Black Art and Culture, FESTAC ’75, in Lagos, Nigeria. He was in charge of recruiting black artists from eight states, including Hawaii for the month long event which saluted the cultural contributions of Pan Africans worldwide. The goal of the Oakland Cannery Collective is to “enact policies that will protect, engage and enhance art and cultural activities that promote the co-existence of artists and emerging business like cannabis commissions, especially those residential places like OCC that lie in designated “green zones.”
Douglas Stewart, OCC resident artist says “Festac Oakland is a call to the ancestors from the Americas to the homeland of Africa. The connection has been distorted and sometimes the signal lost but that re-connection (Sankofa) is what its it’s about. There’s a stolen legacy from Africa that has been hidden and misappropriated. [It’s time to] build those bridges again through the arts, culture, word, technology, spirituality and economics.”
Cannery owners would not sell to the artist-residents in 1978 who wanted to buy the building when they began its transformation. Now Cannery residents are threatened with eviction by its new owner, Coloradoan Cannabis Corporate Real Estate Industry.
The City of Oakland hastily enacted “a city policy for art spaces” back in February when OCC took the fight to City Hall. New policies are in place to temporarily save the housing integrity for Cannery residents, yet nothing is guaranteed.
The elder Monroe’s son, Alistair, says OCC is using “’FESTAC Oakland’ as a vehicle to strengthen the artistic communities and to form alliances across the bay.” The free FESTAC Cultural Arts Festival 2018, Friday, August 31, 7-10 p.m. at the Washington Inn, 495 10th Street and Sat., Sept. 12 noon-10 p.m. in Old Oakland on 9th and Washington, is to bring public awareness to the fight. Artists, poets and chefs and include: Destani Wolf and Jacque Ibula, Umar Bin Hassan, Maisha Quint, Tongo Eisen-Martin and Karla Brundage; chef Romney Steele, artists, Arthur Monroe and Christine Mays, Maker: Willie Hampui Medicine Hats; MCees: Douglas Stewart, Sterling James and host.