May / We Celebrate

We are walking into May with a spirit of celebration! In this month where we honor our mothers, we also honor creativity, nurturance, pleasure, and the blessings that are our bodies and this earth body we call our home. All that to say, we are replenishing after a very busy April.

As Spring tends to do, April gave us much to celebrate. We kicked off the month with a sold out screening of Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez’s 2026 documentary TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, then facilitated the preservation of Black Legacy Family memories in Oakland with our first AfroPortals Community Archive Day alongside Eastside Arts Alliance’s Community Archive Resource Project. We moved grief, joy, rage, and every feeling imaginable through our bodies with “How We Get Over [AndThrough]: Movement For This Moment,” the second iteration of this year’s programming by the Black Women in Mourning & Joy Collective, guided by amara tabor-smith.

Our collective deepened their practices with research and creative residencies — curator and AAFR founder Ashara Ekundayo with an archive residency at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; and Climate Futures and Legacies Manager Ietef Vita returned to France with a continued residency at La Napoule Foundation and then home to Oakland to celebrate the one year anniversary of Revolutionary Rest, our monthly community yoga series.

We closed out the month with “Reclaiming Histories: Black Feminisms and Visual Art,” a roundtable discussion at the SFO Aviation Museum moderated by Ashara Ekundayo engaging the acquisition of 11 artworks by 12 women and gender expansive artists of color by the San Francisco Civic Art Collection.

Time flies, and we cherish every moment we’ve been able to spend in dedication to the Artist As First Responder mission. Looking forward into the second half of the year, we have much more to come, including the continuation of our Black W(hole) programming into 2027, which will commemorate the 30 year anniversary of signing of the Combahee River Collective statement. More on that to come! In the meantime and in between time, thank you for vibing with us. Tend to yourselves and one another in these transformative times, and stay tuned for what’s next from AAFR.

Warmly,
Ashara, Christian, Ietef, Marcella, NiQueen, Sam, and Zandashé

Our Abundance Director and beloved community member NiQueen Jones is transitioning out of her role with AAFR. If you’ve had even the smallest engagement with an AAFR event, you know the gift that is NiQueen. We are in deep gratitude for the love she has poured into our collective over these years and are so grateful that she will remain a pillar in our community. Thank you, NiQueen!

We are honored to have Nakachi Clark-Kasimu joining us in this position with her many gifts and can’t wait to share more about her with you all soon!

Students at the Oakland Public Conservatory’s Summer Music Academy learn from professional teaching artists and explore music from around the world through hands-on classes in banjo, vocals, guitar, flute, saxophone, clarinet, cajón, marimbas, DJing, beat production, visual arts, and more. Learn more about how to enroll your child at the link below.

This call has been EXTENDED to May 14, 2026!

The Alameda County Arts Commission invites visual artists to apply to be considered for public art opportunities at the future African American Wellness Hub in Oakland. The art opportunities may include site-specific integrated artworks and the purchase, commission or license of small, medium and large two-dimensional or low-relief wall-mounted artworks. This Call for Artists is a request for qualifications and is open to practicing, professional visual artists from the 9 Bay Area counties. Artists are invited to submit examples of their past artwork. Applicants should review the full application for complete eligibility requirements.

Save the Date for “Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing

Retrospective” at BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive) June 6th - November 29th, 2026. Learn more below at the Black W(hole) website.