Women and hip-hop: A discussion in downtown Oakland
on March 26, 2013
On Friday, the Betti Ono art gallery in downtown Oakland hosted a panel discussion about women and Hip-Hop. The “My Art, My Culture: Women, Media, and Hip-Hop” three-part discussion was the product of the combined efforts of a number of Bay Area arts organizations including Beats, Rhymes, and Life, which uses hip-hop to empower young people, and the Daughters of Dilla Project, which offers media arts programs for girls.
The walls of the gallery were covered in colorful art, anchored by a giant mural of a Native American woman’s face, which served as the backdrop to the panelists’ conversation. More than 40 people of different ages, races and sexes attended the dialogue about the hardships of breaking into the music industry, as well as the occupational inequalities for women in the music business and in America as a whole.
About a dozen artists, educators and writers took the stage on Friday night; the list included MC and poet Dom Jones, writer Erin Duncan, and San Francisco State professor of Africana Studies Dawn-Elissa Fischer.
“When women are doing their thing, we’re seen as being controlling or too bossy,” said artist Jessica Sabogal. A collection of Sabogal’s art pieces, titled “Better Than Perfect,” adorned the gallery’s walls, including a colorful image of a nude pregnant woman, next to the word “CREATOR” in all capitals.
In response to a question about breaking into the mainstream music industry, Dom Jones said, “I feel compelled to be myself, because there’s no one else like me. That keeps me from being interested and necessarily feeling that I have to study the mainstream—and then assimilate.”
An MC who goes by the name Queens D. Light said that being a strong woman can make you stand out in the Hip Hop industry.“I think of it in a business term: it’s a niche,” she said. “It’s a niche to have a woman who’s unapologetic about being strong in her resiliency and her femininity.”
D. Light, who would later put her MC skills on display and perform for the audience, concluded by saying, “We’re in a new era we don’t have to apologize for that—we just have to do it and execute the projects.”
Erricka Lewis-X, arts & culture coordinator at Beats, Rhymes, and Life, says that she plans to organize more events like this one. “This is the beginning of a conversation that over the next couple of months, over the next year,” she said. “We’re hoping to grow.”
The Betti Ono gallery is located at 1427 Broadway in Oakland.
For more information, see Bettiono.com.
2 Comments
Oakland North welcomes comments from our readers, but we ask users to keep all discussion civil and on-topic. Comments post automatically without review from our staff, but we reserve the right to delete material that is libelous, a personal attack, or spam. We request that commenters consistently use the same login name. Comments from the same user posted under multiple aliases may be deleted. Oakland North assumes no liability for comments posted to the site and no endorsement is implied; commenters are solely responsible for their own content.
Oakland North
Oakland North is an online news service produced by students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and covering Oakland, California. Our goals are to improve local coverage, innovate with digital media, and listen to you–about the issues that concern you and the reporting you’d like to see in your community. Please send news tips to: oaklandnorthstaff@gmail.com.
When you ask NYC Way to either find your current location via GPS or direct it to search a different zip code, it returns location-specific information about nearby parks, museums, stores, and other attractions. This feature alone is valuable, but what makes this app exemplary is all its little microapps, whose info you can string together in very useful combinations. Wondering what food carts are in your current neighborhood? Tap Stands and get listings with the carts avenues and cross streets.
In 1952, the first four Topas suitcases come out. 1976 , Morszeck once again successfully pioneered the first only waterproof suitcase , much film and television production staff, professional photographers and reporters alike. Rimowa Waterproof professional equipment to protect against water , wet, hot and cold climate.