Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, PhD Artist Statement
Title: Movement & Spirit
The Pins chosen represent a microcosm of the story of movement both physical and political of Black bodies from the south to West Oakland CA. Many significant events in my life are associated with the story engaged here and the Pins used to animate the story.
If this project is about the redefining of redlining, then it answers by offering a narrative shaped by redlining that is redefined by ‘memory of movement.’ This ‘memory of movement’ is imbued with the power to self-center, self-articulate, self-determine value and worth, and to intentionally uplift and build on a continuum of self.
Redlining has given way to gentrification. A facet of gentrification is the displacement of people, the dissolving of communal power and support, and the traumatic and disorienting disruption that results from displacement. Ruptures from place can contribute to ruptures in memory or a break in the continuum of self and the sense of the collective we.
This work is a narrative net for the artist continuum of self in the story of the Lower Bottoms and an act of resistance to the erasure of the collective we by gentrification.
The 16th St. train station is a point of entry for conversations of Blackness and the experience of being Black in Oakland CA. It is connected to the literal movement of bodies, one of the largest movements of refugees (migration) in the United States. This was connected to social economic movement in the South and the presumption of opportunity in the West. It fit it with larger movements of inclusion in war, war time economies, and the economic opportunity offered by the railway for Black men to support families and move them out of the south to build a life in the West.
The Lincoln theater on 7th St. is an example of Black businesses built to serve Black people that supplied multiple needs. It was a part of The Harlem of the West an economic wonder that existed despite redlining, police abuses, and all that went with trying to make home in a sundown town after leaving the overt racism of the South.
The business of entertainment and the news was as closely intertwined then as now and news of culture activates on local stages, bars, and juke boxes as well as the news of politics and community building traveled on the train carried by Brothers of the Sleeping Car Porters whose office was down the street from the theater. Out of the plethora of Black businesses on 7th St, I selected the theater because it was founded by the Freemans. Freeman was a common name taken after slavery by Blacks who wanted to be in control of the narrative/life they lived. The Freemans provided a cultural space that was sometimes a church, sometimes a cabaret, and sometimes a place to sleep if you were down on your luck. It is a space in which a particular kind of communal care and spirit collaborated to bring a sense of completeness and a bit of grandeur to a place that thrived surrounded by attempts to confine and starve it. The physical building is gone. The story of the theater is a part of the story of the Harlem of the West that is a part of the story of Oakland, which is a part of the American story of movement and spirits that are persistent in the pursuit of freedom and place in which to enact life. This story matters.
Pin 3, I picked the Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater because it was built on the stories of the 16th St. train station and the dreams played forward in the Lincoln Theater. The Lower Bottom Playaz are Oakland’s oldest Black theater company. It has an origin story in which the Sr. Thea is a crucial part. That story matters to the story of Black theater making and the practice of arts as resistance which is an inbred trait in the Lower Bottoms. The story of service through art and culture and what’s it meant to the narrative of redefining redlining is borne in part by the troupe, its connection and attention to ‘place’ in West Oakland. That the dreams of a Black nun from Mississippi and a Black theater maker who came by Jim Crow car into the 16th St. train station
Could converge in a cultural practice that would not only remember the Harlem of the West but build on its dreams, is the basis for a story of persistence. The story has an origin and is still fighting for the right to write its own future in a once redlined place in a sundown town.