The Art of Moving Through

In a season that asks us to keep moving through uncertainty, possibility, and transformation, we gather in creativity as both compass and catalyst. This month, we invite you into a series of offerings that help us move with intention and imagination: beginning tonight with a screening of TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, followed by a talkback with director Louis Massiah (limited door tickets will be available, so we encourage you to arrive early).

We continue with a Community Archive Day for Black Legacy Families in Deep East Oakland, creating space to protect histories and root legacies in community, and then come together in embodied practice as amara tabor smith guides us through How We Get Over And Through: Movement for This Moment, a session attuned to moving sensation through our bodies. We close the month of April in restoration and reflection with our ongoing Men’s Wellness Fellowship and Revolutionary Rest gatherings.

We hope you’ll join us in creative movement this month, and in all the nourising pauses in between.

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

As part of our AAFR Women’s History Month programming, independent curator Ashara Ekundayo facilitated a guided tour that invited participants to move through the expanded permanent exhibition at SFO airport as an embodied experience, one that mirrors the migratory and transitional states depicted in Allison Saar’s adjacent sculptural work, Flourish, commissioned by SFAC in 2021.

The exhibition now includes newly acquired work from 12 women and gender expansive artists of color including Sydney Cain, Erica Deeman, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Myra Greene, Adia Millet, yetunde olagbaju, Trina Robinson, Eve Sandler, Keisha Scarville, Jessica Sabogal & Shanna Strauss, and Olomidara Yaya (aka Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle) .

Drawing from Saar’s own articulation —

“This series of sculptures reflects the global refugee crisis and the immigrant experience of displacement and adversity. It is a portrait that represents their exterior precarious state and their inner strength and fortitude.

The tour positioned these artworks as both archives of endurance and portals of transformation, inviting audiences to witness the material and metaphorical textures of becoming. Ekundayo guided participants through an encounter with artworks that speak to diasporic movement, rootedness, and repair, while discussing the curatorial methodologies that bring these narratives to public space.

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 (AAWH). 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.

This project includes opportunities for emerging, mid-career, and established artists who create artworks that reflect and honor African American culture, identity, and the diaspora. Artists with a range of experience are invited to apply, including artists with little or no public art experience, as well as artists who have completed major public art commissions