Painting over precarity: Community public art and the optics of dispossession, gentrification and governance in West Oakland, CA

Abstract

Large-scale arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community art projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California. Community murals of the 1960s to 1990s played a critical social role by making visible minority concerns and galvanizing movements for social justice, but questions emerge about contemporary community art in relation to neoliberal values and urban precarity. The Black neighbourhood of West Oakland has been resistant to gentrification due to decades of disinvestment and through robust activism against displacement in one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research and situated visual analysis, I show how neighbourhood resistance was only overcome when change appeared to come from the ‘community’ itself, through the specific imagery and spatiality of community mural projects that resignify the neighbourhood to accommodate gentrification. I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring. Real-estate interests also appropriate signifiers of ‘community’ to reshape neighbourhood identity, valorize property, and police public space. I argue that in West Oakland the ‘community mural’ is vertically integrated in municipal and capital logics that serve to dis-embed, rather than support, historic neighbourhood populations.