Black arts and culture in the Bay Area is not gone, Zakiya Harris told a bus full of people on a recent Saturday, as it pulled away from the Museum of the African Diaspora in downtown San Francisco, and headed for Dogpatch. It is scattered, and it is fighting to stay.
In 1980, more than one in ten people living in San Francisco were Black. In Oakland, nearly one in two were. Those numbers are now closer to 6 percent (in San Francisco) and 20 percent (in Oakland).
The bus tour, organized by the BLACspace cooperative, which Harris co-founded, is about connecting that scattered community. BLACspace wants to grow them, pool their resources and hold land together. It is recruiting members now.
“We know that it takes 50 to 100 years to create a forest,” Harris told the riders on the bus.
The Seed
BLACspace was “was born during the flames of the George Floyd uprisings in Oakland,” Harris said. At the time, Harris said, she saw donations and grants flowing to Black organizations, and asked herself a hard question.
“The non-profit industrial complex was never designed for Black liberation,” Harris said. “What can we build outside of that?”
The answer that emerged was to create a self-governed cooperative of Black arts and culture organizations in Northern California. Its mission statement reads like a planting plan. “The cultural reforestation of a revolutionary ecosystem.”
For now, the work is underground. Roots before reach. “Yes, we still need space,” Harris said, “but more importantly, we need to double, triple down on the spaces that we have.”
Organizations come in as “seed members” to feel it out before joining, Harris said. In the last cohort, about nine organizations came in as seeds. Every one put down roots.
Membership dues run on a sliding scale. One member paid $4,000 for the year. Another paid $40. “It’s not about the dollar amount,” Harris said.
Artist As First Responder, an arts collective founded in 2019 by curator Ashara Ekundayo, was one of the first seeds. In a hard climate for arts funding, the choice was simple, said Ekundayo, in a recent interview “We thought we don’t have anything to lose.”
The Clearing
The tour began in San Francisco on purpose.
“We all know what’s happened to San Francisco,” Harris said.
Harris’s family relocated here in 1978 and later moved to Oakland. Over the following decades, discriminatory housing policies, urban renewal projects, and economic displacement, including the closure of military bases and rampant divestment, led to Black neighborhoods in both cities. thinned like a logged hillside.
The Black culture of both places did not disappear. It was harvested. You can hear it in the music. See it in the now-ubiquitous art created by generations.
“Oftentimes the people who create that culture don’t benefit from it,” Harris said.
Photo by A.V. Benford October
The Parent Tree
Every seedling falls from an older tree.
At the Minnesota Street Project, Ekundayo speaks with Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party. AAFR and Ekundayo have studios in the space.
Founder & Executive Director of Artist As First Responder at Minnesota Street Project
In conversation. Photo by A.V. Benford October 2, 2026
Douglas came to the Fillmore in 1951, at the age seven, and went on to study graphic design at City College Starting in 1967, Douglas gave the Panthers their look. He redesigned their paper and imagery with bold lines, in a style that worked well with cheap ink.
“It was a visual language,”Douglas said.
His images now hang in museums. What happens, Ekundayo asked Douglas, when a revolutionary image outlives its emergency?
“Well, it doesn’t get lost,” Douglas said. “It just begins to inform another audience.”
New audiences find their own meaning in it, Douglas said. Some viewers see an aunt. An uncle. “So now they’re taking ownership of the artwork.”
Root First
A seedling grows down before it grows up.
The bus drives over the bridge into Oakland, stopping at B-Love’s Guest House at 1131 Center St. in West Oakland. Traci Bartlow, a dancer and photographer, bought the Victorian her family once rented and opened it to guests a year before AirBNB.
“This features the architecture, the original craftsmanship of this property that was built in 1895,” Bartlow said, opening the upstairs gallery.
In the garden a member led riders through a somatic practice. Feet on the ground. Breath slow. Rooting down.
“You can’t be economically free without doing the healing work and the inner work,” Hope Henson Lehman said.
Root first. Then reach.
Two Leaves
A little under a mile away, at 1035 Seventh St., the first leaves were opening.
At Koo Labs, a design and production space centered on the youth run by Kingmakers of Oakland, an educational nonprofit , a three-panel mural by Senegalese artists covers the front. Inside, teenagers design what they wear, and wear what they design.
These are the trees that will stand in 2076.
“We really help our young brothers take their crowns out of their pocket and rock it by understanding who and whose they are,” said Baba Chris of Kingmakers.
Baba Chris told riders about surviving a heart attack, and having to step away from Kingmakers. About the brothers who stepped in and kept watering like Kahlil Chatman Program Director and the Facilites Manger Toks Ajike.
Kingmakers centers Black boys, he added But a forest is not a monoculture.
“This is a safe space for all of our kings, queens and non-binary royalty.” Baba Chris said.
At Koo Labs, the Betti Ono Foundation screened its film, “Art and Everyday People.” For 12 years the group held 1427 Broadway, now the Black Panther Party Museum. It lost its city-owned space during the pandemic.
Some seeds get a plot. Others ride the wind.
“We’re spaceless,” said Anyka Howard, Betti Ono’s founder and CEO. “But holding, liberating, healing, and taking up space wherever we are.”
Stones In The Soil
Down the street, the ruins where the old forest fell still remain.
The Seventh Street corridor in West Oakland once hummed with Black business. One by one, as a series of redevelopment projects decimated the business corridor, it emptied. Esther’s Orbit Room, a legendary blues club opened by the equally legendary Esther Mabrey in 1963, was the last one standing before it closed in 2011.
“Seventh Street is an emblematic instance of how wealth stripping works for underserved communities,” said Noni Session, executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.
The cooperative is reviving the club as Esther’s Orbit Room and Cultural Arts Center. A 7th Street Museum is taking shape next door.
Contractors said the building’s stone facade could not be saved. In response, the cooperative’s members held a workday — hey called it rock breaking — and, Session said, and “took the rock facade off ourselves with our own hands.”
The stones sit in a pile, waiting to go back up. Seeds saved from the last harvest.
Esther planted, too, Session added. She ran a scholarship fund for local kids, and had her own ideas of how to spend it.
“She said the A and B students were taken care of,” Session said. “It’s the C students that are left behind.”
Eugene McNeely remembers the street in full canopy. McNeely’s father worked aboard the California Zephyr, the train between Oakland and Chicago and when he was away, McNeely’s mother went to the nightclub, and parked the kids outside with candy, asking other club goers to keep an eye on them.
“We saw a lot of wild stuff as a kid,” McNeely said.
McNeely lived in the old forest. Now McNeely helps fertilize the new one with rich stories of Oakland’s past lives.
Canopy
At BAM House, Black women grow their own shade.
The 100-seat theater on 1540 Broadway in downtown Oakland, was recently taken over by Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, founder and director of the Lower Bottom Playaz theater troupe, and Oakland’s first poet laureate. Inside Nzinga, Margo Hall, Edris Cooper and Cat Brooks talked theater-making, craft and the future of the field. Hall leads San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, one of the West Coast’s oldest Black professional theaters. Again and again, the talk turned to Black women waiting under someone else’s tree.
They are done waiting.
“One way, is build your own damn house,” Nzinga said.
What Falls
By nightfall, the bus reached BlaQyard, a Black and queer-led housing, land and arts project in Fruitvale. In the backyard turned grove, palm wine passed hand to hand.
In the yard waited “Spelling,” an altar by Dan, a Jamaican-Guyanese artist, co-founder of 7000COILS, and B Dukes, a trans and non-binary Oakland artist. A path of reclaimed railroad spikes and black-eyed peas led the bus riders in.
Nearby, filmmakers Gelli Pascual and Tiffani Marie screened “Joshua Tree (Part 2)”. The short belongs to a larger body of work, “Death Gives Love Meaning,” and won the Festival Director’s Award at the Tag! 2026 Film Festival. The bus riders sat with it. Some cried. Some spoke the names of cousins, grandmothers, aunties.
Pascual and Tiffani Marie are partners. Pascual calls the film “a declaration of the impermanence of it all.”
“It is in the loss of those that we love, that we get to experience a different type of love,” Pascual continued.
“Now is what we have, It’s all that we have.”
