Celebrating Oakland’s Betti Ono Gallery, a Decade-Long Cultural Anchor

From 2011 until 2021, the Betti Ono art gallery served as a community anchor in the heart of downtown Oakland. As a cultural incubator, it benefited a number of local and national creatives — myself included.

Inside the expansive windows of 1427 Broadway, the concept of the traditional white box gallery was flipped on its head.

Betti Ono showcased visual artists and musicians. It hosted joyous baby showers and somber vigils. It held lit parties and sultry poetry nights. It gave space to conversations about housing rights, and a provided a home for multimedia pieces addressing the biggest social issues of the time.

When KQED launched the Rightnowish podcast, it was the perfect venue for our first live event. The gallery, much like the podcast, was all about prioritizing art and community connections.

For a decade, some of the Bay Area’s most talented people frequented Betti Ono. In many ways, the people were the art. Now, a documentary puts the significance of the gallery in its proper context.

Art and Everyday People: The Story of the Betti Ono Foundation charts the birth of Betti Ono, its impact and what’s next for the organization now, 15 years after its founding.

The short documentary film, directed by former KQED reporter Ariana Proehl, shows “all the beautiful people” who frequented the space. Proehl predicts that the film’s free premiere this Wednesday at the New Parkway in Oakland will be a much-needed reconvening of that community. 

“It’s going to be a really great reunion for Betti Ono,” Proehl tells me during a video call, adding that right now, “we need some reminders of our power.”

One example of the film’s power is found in its photo montages, poetically presented over a score by Oakland-based musician and educator Chanelle Ignant, also formerly of KQED.

Each clip reveals a who’s-who of renowned artists, often smiling or sharing an embrace. Those include photographer Britt Sense, singer Aisha Fukushima and rapper Ovrkast., multitalented radio host Paris Warr, augmented reality artist Damien McDuffie, cultural icon Emory Douglas, visual artists Karen and Malik Seneferu and more.

The “Stop Telling Women to Smile” social campaign by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, a visual artist who had a residency at Betti Ono, exemplifies the international reach of the gallery’s diaspora.

The #NotOneMoreGirl initiative, a push to end gender-based violence on public transit and a response to the killing of Nia Wilson, underscores the gallery’s work locally.

And Betti Ono’s Arts and Civic Engagement fellowship (ACE), a space for youth to advance solutions to community issues, highlights the organization’s investment in the next generation. 

The film features conversations with muralist and printmaker Jessica Sabogal and photographer Kierra Jenaé Johnson, both of whom explain how the space incubated them as young artists and pushed them further in the careers.

Providing a larger context of Oakland in the 2010s are interviews with artist and curator Zakiya Harris, lyricist and educator Davin “DoDat” Thompson and journalist and author Eric K. Arnold.

The three note that before Betti Ono, a rapidly changing downtown Oakland offered far too little space to the Black community largely responsible for the Town’s cultural currency. In the midst of those changes, Betti Ono founder Anyka Howard returned to the Bay Area from Atlanta, bringing with her an appetite for community gatherings and artistic events.

Howard traces Betti Ono’s roots to 2010, when she started a weekly event called Smashbox Live, a “live arts experience that brings creative people together to network, collaborate, exchange ideas and also promote their practice.”

The idea took off, but the she was forced to change the name after receiving a cease-and-desist letter. She settled on a name inspired by funk singer and songwriter Betty Davis and multitalented artist and activist Yoko Ono. The two women, Howard says in the film, represented “this notion of smashing the box and challenging the status quo.”

In the film, Howard opens up about her community work, and how it stems from generations of Black women committed to and caring for their people. As a child, Howard would accompany her great-grandmother as she visited the sick and infirm, and ran Richmond’s youth employment program, ensuring young people had summertime work.

“They weren’t waving flags,” Howard says in the film, discussing her family’s matriarchs. “They were just living in their truth.”

Through Betti Ono, Howard co-founded the BlacSPACECooperative and the Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition. She pushed for cultural preservation, challenged city policy regarding arts funding and navigated instances of police scrutinizing large gatherings of people of color.

While the gallery stood out amongst the changing face of Oakland by providing a space for creative communities to thrive, its backbone was that it was simply serving the people through art.

“That’s totally in line with what the Black Panthers were doing, what the Black Arts Movement was all about,” says Eric Arnold in the film. “This whole legacy of cultural arts in Oakland that goes back to the ’60s and ’70s, and really created a global movement that hasn’t stopped yet.”

In making the film, Proehl looked closely at how Betti Ono served the people, herself included. 

A first-time filmmaker with a background in journalism and poetry, Proehl had wanted to make a film since the early 2000s, when she was enrolled as an ethnic studies student at UC Berkeley. She started off volunteering at the Women of Color Film Festival, an annual event at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive. “I ended up becoming a co-director and co-curator,” says Proehl. “At that point in time, I was like, ‘Oh, I really wanna make a documentary.’”

But desire and a camcorder weren’t enough. “I didn’t have the confidence, or the know-how,” reflects Proehl. When Howard and the Betti Ono team reached out for help telling the story of the organization ahead of its 15th anniversary, Proehl took it as a sign.

“It all culminates,” she says of her past work experience, informing this next step in her career. “I feel like I’m in my lane now, it feels really good.”

Her first move in that lane: telling the intimate story of one of the most significant spaces for artists in Oakland in the 15 years. 

“Getting to see a woman’s — a Black woman’s vision,” says Proehl, describing Howard’s trajectory from simply wanting to “have an art night” to opening her own gallery and holding space for so many community members, “that’s just a beautiful thing.”

‘Art & Everyday People: The Story of the Betti Ono Foundation‘  premieres on Wednesday, April 29, at 7 p.m. at the New Parkway Theater (474 24th St., Oakland). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Anyka Howard and Ariana Proehl, hosted by Jada Imani.

There will also be a post-screening reception at Night Heron, 1780 Telegraph Ave in Uptown Oakland. 

For more information check here.