On Alice Street in Oakland, a mural sparks a cultural movement
Documentary streaming at KDocsFF follows the creation of a massive public artwork amid gentrification in the heart of the city’s diverse artistic hub
Esailama from Alice Street. Photo by Ayse Gursoz
KDocsFF 2022 presents Alice Street from February 18 to 27 online. The film is featured in a special presentation with a live Q&A/panel discussion with the film’s director and key subjects alongside Jean Swanson: We Need New Map on February 26 at 7 pm online.
THE MALONGA CASQUELOURD Center for the Arts on Alice Street at 14th in downtown Oakland, named after a late ambassador of African culture, has, since the 1920s, been a place where people come together to drum and dance. Around the corner, Chinese seniors take part in art, dance, and choir groups at Hotel Oakland Village, an affordable aging-in-place facility. The diverse community has long been a cultural hub where artists, arts, and culture thrive.
The neighbourhood was also home to a remarkable four-storey mural called Universal Language by Desi Mundo, a Chicago-born aerosol artist, and Chilean-born visual artist and muralist Pancho Peskador, both of the Community Renovation Project. Featuring portraits of esteemed local artists and community leaders, it encapsulated in glorious colour the area’s history and became a point of neighbourhood pride.
The mural is still there, but it’s now completely obscured by a luxury condo tower.
The mural also sparked a movement, galvanizing the community in an effort to protect arts, culture, history, affordability, and identity amid rapid property development, with people dancing and drumming their way to City Hall.
The years-long saga of the artwork and the impacts of gentrification are the focus of Alice Street, a full-length documentary by Oakland filmmaker Spencer Wilkinson that comes to Canada via KDocsFF 2022.
“The story is a tremendous example of how cross-cultural artists can unite to work towards common goals and utilize art and music as forms of resistance,” Wilkinson tells Stir by phone. “There’s a long history in Oakland of that kind of activism within the arts community. The Black Panthers had a funk band as part of their avenue of organizing and drawing on the community through messaging in their music. The Malonga Center has a long history of resisting being displaced by going to City Hall and bringing their drums and dancing their traditional dances as a form of resistance. The organizing that happened within the storyline is kind of an extension of that legacy in Oakland.
“So is the idea of public art being a place to rally around,” adds Wilkinson in a phone interview. “When you paint the history of a community and celebrate leaders of a community on the walls, it becomes a lot harder to ignore that those communities exist there and have been forming the cultural fabric of the neighbourhood and have a right to remain. Art plays a role in a lot of facets for organizing and resisting gentrification.”
Hotel Oakland Village. Photo by Spencer Wilkinson
Wilkinson, who earned a degree in anthropology at University of California Santa Cruz and worked with at-risk and homeless youth prior to launching his filmmaking company, Endangered Ideas, has called the neighbourhood home for several years.
In Alice Street, he features compelling interviews with numerous important community members, including Ruth Beckford, a lifelong activist known as the “Mother of Black Dance” in the Bay Area who toured with her own African-Haitian dance company (and who passed away in 2019 at age 94); master drummer and drum maker Mosheh Milon, who struggles to maintain his craft amid soaring rental rates; Lailan Huen, a core member of Oakland’s Chinatown Coalition and daughter of Oakland’s first Asian American female mayor; Theo Williams, founder of the SambaFunk! Afro-Brazilian dance group based out of the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts; Ayodele Nzinga, co-founder of the new Black Arts Movement and Business District; and many others.
Dancer Ruth Beckford (1925 to 2019).
As community members face displacement, the mural itself is confronted with several challenges during its creation besides the most threatening—the developer whose first words to come to mind to describe the historic site of the future condo as “sought-after”—such as a particularly aggrieved resident who launches a relentless letter-writing campaign against the artists.
Alice Street director Spencer Wilkinson.
Alice Street illustrates the ways the arts can move people not just emotionally but to action. At a time when society has never seemed more divided, arts and culture can bring people together. The film is going on a national impact tour throughout 2022; the team recently presented Alice Street at an urban planning conference in Calgary.
“Our goal from the outset was that the film could be a tool for other communities who are seeing similar issues take place with gentrification,” Wilkinson says. “The film can be an example for communities to draw inspiration from and ideas for what they can do in their own neighbourhoods, ways to develop diverse coalitions with people who might be their cross-the-street neighbour but they’ve never talked before, finding common issues and common causes. That’s really the hope.”
For more information, see KDocsFF.
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