Arts and Culture

Oakland Landscape Designer Wins MacArthur Genius Award

Published

6 years ago

October 3, 2019

In the way that life experience can be more circular than linear, so are certain incidents marking MacArthur “Genius” award-winner Walter Hood’s life right now. The West Oakland public artist and landscape designer whose work, he says, strives to retain the cultural memory of places as its residents change, is involved in a project just breaking ground that bears witness to the ugly truth of slavery.

This weekend he is going to reconnect with a college friend, Ford Morrison, the surviving son of the late author Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison’s famous 1989 statement that there were no known monuments acknowledging the horror of slavery led to ‘the bench by the road’ on Sullivan’s Island, S.C., in 2008, which bears a plaque marking the place where about 40 percent of the Africans entered the maw of slavery in the U.S.

Hood had already been commissioned by the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., to design its garden when a side trip to the bench inspired the museum directors to do more. That’s how Hood got the job of creating a monument to honor the memory of those who perished as a result of the slave trade.

His vision for the monument is to create a “place to talk about our ancestors, meditate…a space where people can just be.”

Recent excavations prove that the place is indeed where the slave auction house once stood and where they came and went by the thousands.

To Hood, it is hallowed ground. He envisions a fountain whose base will be an abstract sculpture inspired by depictions of how the Africans traveled in the hulls of the slave ships, stacked upon one another.

Hood expects the project to be finished next year and the museum plans to open in 2021.
To date, most of Hood’s work has been commissioned but the no-strings-attached award of $625,000 will give him some breathing room to perhaps indulge in some fine art as well as public art.

“I would like to do some painting or some sculpture,” he said, adding that he would also like to spend a little more time playing guitar.

The owner of Hood Design Studio was at his office when he learned the news last week. “At first I thought it was a gag,” he initially told the Los Angeles Times. “I was floored. I walked around in a daze.”

Hood, who also teaches at UC Berkeley where he earned a MArch in 1989, is described by the foundation as “a landscape architect bringing social justice concerns and ecological sustainability to his field through a commitment to community and historical memory.”
The Seventh Street Gateway in West Oakland is an example of the 61-year-old’s vision. “We put seven faces of African American heroes over the road as a gateway, but we used the Caltrans signpost to do it,” he told the LA Times.

As West Oakland’s population changes, the Gateway sculpture takes on additional meaning. “Most of my work on any public land is trying to document, and represent culture as cities change,” he said. “How do we imbue our public landscapes with those kind of landscapes that remind the people who live there of themselves?”

His intent was proven when he attended a conference of Black designers on the East Coast and the sculpture was brought up and a young Black man interrupted him.
“That’s your work?” he asked.

The young man told Hood that he worked in San Francisco, and said that passing the sculpture each day on BART “gave him strength” as he prepared to enter a challenging environment. Passing the sculpture on the way home lets him know “that he is home,” Hood said.

Hood will continue to be dedicated public art and is commited to becoming part of an art community that “weaves together a different set of narratives of how we see ourselves, new ways of seeing each other in a given place.”

“Seeing each other” is important to Hood, who has witnessed the West Oakland neighborhood, where his studio is located, change over the last 25 years.

“I’ve watched families grow up here and move away, and other families move in,” he said, tiredness showing in his voice. “We don’t know how to talk about ghettoization of people, the way value is lost when one group of people lives in a place, but value is gained when another group of people moves in.”

Wanda Ravernell

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New Oakland Moving Forward

This week, several socially enterprising members of this group visited Oakland to explore ways to collaborate with local stakeholders at Youth Empowerment Partnership, the Port of Oakland, Private Industry Council, Oakland, Mayor-elect Barbara Lee, the Oakland Ballers ownership group, and the oversight thought leaders in the Alameda County Probation Department.

Published

4 weeks ago

May 18, 2025

Oakland Post

iStock.

By Post Staff

Since the African American Sports and Entertainment Group purchased the City of Oakland’s share of the Alameda County Coliseum Complex, we have been documenting the positive outcomes that are starting to occur here in Oakland.

Some of the articles in the past have touched on actor Blair Underwood’s mission to breathe new energy into the social fabric of Oakland. He has joined the past efforts of Steph and Ayesha Curry, Mistah Fab, Green Day, Too Short, and the Oakland Ballers.

This week, several socially enterprising members of this group visited Oakland to explore ways to collaborate with local stakeholders at Youth Empowerment Partnership, the Port of Oakland, Private Industry Council, Oakland, Mayor-Elect Barbara Lee, the Oakland Ballers ownership group, and the oversight thought leaders in the Alameda County Probation Department.

These visits represent a healthy exchange of ideas and plans to resuscitate Oakland’s image. All parties felt that the potential to impact Oakland is right in front of us. Most recently, on the back side of these visits, the Oakland Ballers and Blair Underwood committed to a 10-year lease agreement to support community programs and a community build-out.

So, upward and onward with the movement of New Oakland.

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Arts and Culture

BOOK REVIEW: Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy

When Bridgett M. Davis was in college, her sister Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

Published

2 months ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Love Rita Book Cover. Courtesy of Harper.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Bridgett M. Davis, c.2025, Harper, $29.99, 367 Pages

Take care.

Do it because you want to stay well, upright, and away from illness. Eat right, swallow your vitamins and hydrate, keep good habits and hygiene, and cross your fingers. Take care as much as you can because, as in the new book, “Love, Rita” by Bridgett M. Davis, your well-being is sometimes out of your hands.

It was a family story told often: when Davis was born, her sister, Rita, then four years old, stormed up to her crying newborn sibling and said, ‘Shut your … mouth!’

Rita, says Davis, didn’t want a little sister then. She already had two big sisters and a neighbor who was somewhat of a “sister,” and this baby was an irritation. As Davis grew, the feeling was mutual, although she always knew that Rita loved her.

Over the years, the sisters tried many times not to fight — on their own and at the urging of their mother — and though division was ever present, it eased when Rita went to college. Davis was still in high school then, and she admired her big sister.

She eagerly devoured frequent letters sent to her in the mail, signed, “Love, Rita.”

When Davis was in college herself, Rita was diagnosed with lupus, a disease of the immune system that often left her constantly tired and sore. Davis was a bit unfazed, but sympathetic to Rita’s suffering and also annoyed that the disease sometimes came between them. By that time, they needed one another more than ever.

First, they lost their father. Drugs then invaded the family and addiction stole two siblings. A sister and a young nephew were murdered in a domestic violence incident. Their mother was devastated; Rita’s lupus was an “added weight of her sorrow.”

After their mother died of colon cancer, Rita’s lupus took a turn for the worse.

“Did she even stand a chance?” Davis wrote in her journal.

“It just didn’t seem possible that she, someone so full of life, could die.”

Let’s start here: once you get past the prologue in “Love, Rita,” you may lose interest. Maybe.

Most of the stories that author Bridgett M. Davis shares are mildly interesting, nothing rare, mostly commonplace tales of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s with a sibling. There are a lot of these kinds of stories, and they tend to generally melt together. After about fifty pages of them, you might start to think about putting the book aside.

But don’t. Not quite yet.

In between those everyday tales, Davis occasionally writes about being an ailing Black woman in America, the incorrect assumptions made by doctors, the history of medical treatment for Black people (women in particular), attitudes, and mythologies. Those passages are now and then, interspersed, but worth scanning for.

This book is perhaps best for anyone with the patience for a slow-paced memoir, or anyone who loves a Black woman who’s ill or might be ill someday. If that’s you and you can read between the lines, then “Love, Rita” is a book to take in carefully.

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Faces Around the Bay: Author Karen Lewis Took the ‘Detour to Straight Street’

“My life has been a roller-coaster with an unlimited ride wristband! I was raised in Berkeley during the time of Ron Dellums, the Black Panthers, and People’s Park. I was a Hippie kid, my Auntie cut off all our hair so we could wear the natural styles like her and Angela Davis.

Published

2 months ago

April 28, 2025

Oakland Post

Karen Lewis. Courtesy photo.

By Barbara Fluhrer

I met Karen Lewis on a park bench in Berkeley. She wrote her story on the spot.

I got married young, then ended up getting divorced, raising two boys into men. After my divorce, I had a stroke that left me blind and paralyzed. I was homeless, lost in a fog with blurred vision.

Jesus healed me! I now have two beautiful grandkids. At 61, this age and this stage, I am finally free indeed. Our Lord Jesus Christ saved my soul. I now know how to be still. I lay at his feet. I surrender and just rest. My life and every step on my path have already been ordered. So, I have learned in this life…it’s nice to be nice. No stressing, just blessings. Pray for the best and deal with the rest.

Nobody is perfect, so forgive quickly and love easily!”

Lewis’ book “Detour to Straight Street” is available on Amazon.