No Place Like the Town
July 27th 2024 • Frank Ogawa Plaza • Oakland
Edutainment for Equity hosted an event at the center of our city to collectively grieve, to imagine a future, to acknowledge both our pain and our power. We called on artists and spritualists, activists and healers, producers and conveners to join us in Frank Ogawa Plaza to make art, demand more from our city, and collectively plead with any who listen that art is for everybody. This was not a protest against anything or anyone, this was a call to the creative forces that have truly built this city and those who continue to make lasting contributions to come together and collectively affirm that we deserve more. The agenda was simple: Collective Strategic Dreaming, Live Poetry Performances, and ceremony to call on our ancestors.
All photos courtesy of Bethanie Hines Photography
On July 27, 2024, artists, civic leaders, and community health providers in 18 cities and towns across America simultaneously premiered an array of large-scale participatory art projects which drew on the sounds, styles, and stories of their communities to answer the prompt “No place like home.”
In big cities and rural counties, hundreds of actors, muralists, poets, folk dancers, circus clowns, farmers, flower artists, skaters, cooks, architects, DJs, puppeteers, nurses, mariachi players, bamboo weavers and more created new works that show the world where they come from. The result will be a celebration of American pluralism–of unity through diversity. From Seattle to Gainesville, from Providence to Honolulu, it was an outpouring of local joy. In Oakland our contribution was No Place Like The Town.
In connection with Exhibit A Oakland, we distributed a magazine of digital visualizations that illustrate the depths of systemic Anti Blackness that plague this city. here is a link to the free magazine.