Community
It is a quiet Sunday afternoon, and Pro Arts Gallery is closed to the public. But even on her day off, the executive director Natalia Mount is excited about the current exhibition. Stylishly dressed in a fitted black leather jacket and heeled boots, she plugs in three sculptures that begin to produce loud sounds. The exhibition, titled “Invisible Choirs,” is artist Nolan Lem’s interpretation of the societal effects of automation and artificial intelligence. Lem experimented with sound and movement to…
Crack, snap, and pop. That it is all you hear on the football field as Ronald Jenkins, known to his friends and teammates as RJ, drives his shoulder into the waistline of the ball carrier for the opposing team. With a huge thud that sounds like a body breaking in half, they both hit the turf. As the whistle blows in the background, signaling the end of the play, Jenkins gets up and proceeds to dance, not even acknowledging his…
Bang! There go the bowling pins, as Benton Lu knocks down another strike on the bowling lane. He stands there quietly, and admires his work. Then he turns around, and walks back to the resurfacing machine to grab his ball. Lu returns to position to deliver another strike. He cocks his left foot back, and begins to walk slowly towards the lane, like a lion getting ready to devour its prey. His eyes look as if he was in a…
The ball smacks down right in the middle of the court off of Hannah Hoang’s hand. She quickly runs back into the line, as she gets ready to deliver another devastating spike. She leaps into the air as gracefully as if she were performing ballet, but comes down hard with a spike that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As a defender on the women’s volleyball team at Oakland Senior High School, Hoang is…
Some athletes have a strong passion for their sport, and play it recreationally. Others play their sports because they rely on them to escape the stress of their daily life. And still thers depend on their performance to land them an athletic scholarship, and compete within the Oakland Athletic League hoping to get recruited to college teams and compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association level. In this series, three Oakland student athletes spoke about what brings them to the field,…
This article is part of “Birthing Inequity,” an Oakland North project on maternal and infant health disparities in Oakland. See the full multimedia report here. In 2003, while she was carrying her third child, Tanisha Fuller had to convince her hospital caretakers that something was really wrong. Six months pregnant, and unsure of what was happening to her, she’d rushed to the emergency room with pain in her back, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, she was told that…
At a time when Oakland neighborhoods are gentrifying, Sue Mark, founder of Commons Archive, hopes to share the stories of residents in the Golden Gate neighborhood and bring together neighbors to form stronger community bonds.
Oakland City workers represented by SEIU Local 1021, with the solidarity of IBEW 1245 workers, have been participating in an unfair labor practice strike for the last four days, while IFPTE Local 21 has participated in a sympathy strike.
Over the years, the gap between those who have access to Internet and computers and those who don’t has narrowed. However, access to the Internet is still a problem for around 20% of Oakland residents, while around 9% of residents can only access the Internet through a smartphone.