Oakland’s EastSide Arts Alliance Celebrates 25 Years — With Big Changes Ahead

Oakland’s EastSide Arts Alliance is a cultural hub where young artists are politicized, community members are fed and events like the Malcolm X Jazz Festival are organized.

More than a traditional jazz fest, the event is a community resource where creatives, educators and entrepreneurs celebrate a variety of arts. It’s where 10 years ago Amiri Baraka, the father of the Black Arts Movement, was honored after he transitioned. It’s where a young Kehlani once performed under the mentorship of the late D’Wayne Wiggins.

On Saturday, Sept. 20, EastSide Arts Alliance kicks off its 25th anniversary with A Taste of EastSide, the first in a year-long series of events celebrating the center with art, food, history and community.

The afternoon fundraiser and performance includes the talented Dnaga Dance Company, longtime EastSide Arts collaborator and Deep Waters Dance Theatre founder amara tabor-smith, violinist Tarika Lewis — the first woman to join the Black Panther Party — and others.

The event comes at a time of transition for for the community institution. Greg Jung Morozumi, EastSide Arts Alliance co-founder and mentor to many, passed in June. Elena Serrano and Susanne Takehara, the center’s two remaining founding members, will soon step down.

Yet even as the baton is passed to the next generation, Serrano says, the work isn’t going to stop.

The birth of an community institution

The seeds that grew into EastSide Arts Alliance were planted in the late 1990s, when four collectives came together. Aerosol writers Mike “Dream” Francisco and the TDK crew, Favianna Rodriguez’s C4 collective, the Black Dot’s Marcel Diallo and Letitia Ntofon and organizers from Taller sin Fronteras (also known as TSF or Workshop Without Borders) all came together to curate the first Malcolm X Jazz Festival in 2000.

They were informed by the work of Amiri Baraka, Yuri Kochiyama, Malaquías Montoya and especially Malcolm X. The festival exemplified “the liberation of people from Third World,” says Serrano — and art was the unifying force.

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” Serrano says, reflecting on the first Malcolm X Jazz Festival. “We booked 11 acts on the main stage.” Attempting to reach all demographics with “straight-ahead jazz, jazz with hip-hop, Asian jazz, Latin jazz” and more, Serrano says, they soon learned to book less performers. But their heart was in the right place, and San Antonio Park provided a perfect location for their mission.

Formerly the site of bear and bull fights in the 1800s, San Antonio Park is located on the rolling hills of the 20s in East Oakland. At the time of the first jazz festival, organizers saw the surrounding community of Southeast Asian, Chicano, Indigenous, and African-American residents as a prime example of Third World solidarity.

“But,” says Serrano, “it was also one of the poorest neighborhoods in Oakland.”

As philanthropic efforts were aimed at curbing the neighborhood’s problems, Serrano and company emphasized its benefits, like its diversity. “This is the most culturally rich community ever,” she says. “This is a true asset.”

Once the newly founded EastSide Arts Alliance secured funding, they launched a cultural space focused on unity to “build power amongst the people” and make needed change, says Serrano.

A far-ranging influence

Over the decades, and spanning three different locations, the center has provided a home for young people. It’s where artists grow into refined practitioners, like Leslie “Dime” Lopez. At the turn of the millennium, Lopez was a teenager who just wanted to spray paint. Now in her late 30s, Dime’s aerosol artwork now covers walls throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

“Graf was a big thing during that time in my life,” she says, reflecting on her teenage years during a recent phone call. She was introduced to the center when a close friend volunteered at EastSide Arts’ first Malcolm X Jazz Festival. Lopez tagged along, and soon she started attending programs, working on murals and doing banner pieces on the sidewalk. “It was the very first stages,” says Lopez, “of being a part of a community of writers that were doing a bigger things in the neighborhood.”

Kevin Akhidenor, an educator, lyricist and accomplished freestyle rapper, also found a home at EastSide starting in 2002, when he and a friend first attended its Beats Flows program.

Akhidenor clearly remembers his first day, when he was a glasses-wearing fresh face on the scene. When he walked into the center, program leaders “bum-rushed” him — “they were just roasting me, and battling me,” he laughs. Momentarily overwhelmed, he quickly responded: “Battling and freestyling ain’t never been no issue to me,” he reflects, “so I just battled back.”

Akhidenor has been involved ever since.

In 2003, Akhidenor met Greg Morozumi, Elena Serrano and Traci Bartlow, and realized, “This is an arts political organization.” He soon joined the Malcolm X Jazz Festival planning committee, hosted a stage at that year’s event and eventually joined EastSide’s staff.

Well-known jazz musician Howard Wiley has been part of the Malcolm X Jazz Festival since the event’s second year. He remembers it vividly — not only because he played alongside Marcus Shelby’s group, but because he borrowed his grandmother’s diesel Mercedes Benz to get there. “And I didn’t have a license,” Wiley says.

In recent years, he’s become the de facto curator of the main stage. One of the most important aspects for him of the jazz festival, and EastSide as a whole, is how artists gain political knowledge from people who’ve lived it firsthand.

Through Morozumi and Serrano, Wiley has met members of the Last Poets and hung-out with famed jazz saxophonist David Murray. He’s heard about conversations with Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane and Malcolm X from people who were there when the titans talked. He was also blessed with Greg Morozumi’s record collection before he passed.

“When he had to go into hospice,” Wiley says, “we moved him out, and we were just moving all these tapes, records and books.” Blown away by the wealth in Morozumi’s archives, Wiley says, “Man, that was a dude who was committed to knowledge of the community.”

‘You want to make the ancestors proud’

In the space adjacent to EastSide Arts is Bandung Books, where many of Greg’s old books have found a home. “That idea of literacy,” says Serrano, “is something that we want to stress.”

Known for community events like the last month’s Xicana Moratorium Block Party, the center’s most foundational practice is the simple act of reading. The first program at EastSide was the Community Archive Resource Project, which started with materials Greg had collected over 50 years of organizing work.

Comprised of binders of material from around the world, highlighting community actions against police brutality and uplifting the importance of the arts, Greg would use the archive as a tool for mentorship.

“When this generation of young people in our music studio wants to write about police brutality,” says Serrano, “Greg would be like, ‘Okay, look at all this stuff that came before you. You don’t have to reinvent stuff, you have to take it to the next level.'”

Now digitized, Serrano says Greg’s archives of posters, music, buttons and books push artists to ask themselves, “Now, what is your role?”

In the coming months, Serrano will fully transition out of leadership at the center, and pass the baton to a collective of people who’ve been with the center since their teens, including Kevin Akhidenor and Leslie “Dime” Lopez.

“My heart is split in so many different ways,” says Lopez, about the forthcoming changes. On one hand, “I’m excited for our elders, and to continue their legacy and to really stand on the shoulders of those that built the space.”

But she can’t help but feel the pressure of taking the reins. “It’s scary,” Lopez says, “you want to make your parents proud, you know? And you want to make the ancestors proud as well.”

Reflecting on the legacy of Greg Morozumi, as well as Elena Serrano and Susanne Takehara, Lopez gives them their flowers: “They shared so much and gave so much of their lives to this space,” she says, “for us to continue that work, the only thing we can do is pay it forward.”

A Taste of EastSide takes place Saturday, Sept. 20, at EastSide Arts Alliance (2277 International Blvd., Oakland). Tickets and more information here.