Pro Arts COMMONS is a collectively held space in Oakland, California that blurs the line between art, debate, experimentation, and collaboration. Through the sharing of material and immaterial resources, we reflect Oakland’s existing artistic and cultural fabric, while creating future landscape of other commons-centric spaces that encourage the economic and cultural power of the community. Our collaborative activities are rooted in these mutual values and principles. Our process of becoming is documented through our monthly Pro Arts COMMONS Newsletter, found in the PUBLICATIONS section on our website. For access, CLICK HERE.
We are also a global, peer-to-peer networked community, spearheading a movement towards a post-capitalist art economy. Working together, commoners and affinity groups aim to reframe the value of art and art labor in the context of a sharing economy. We disrupt the logic of capital through sustaining those commons-centric spaces, practices, and value production models that re-wire the broken connections between artist, community, and everyday life.
Currently, we are experimenting with Shared Leadership, Governance and Participatory Budgeting.
PLAYERS
Natalia Ivanova
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF PRO ARTS
Natalia Ivanova is a dynamic cultural leader, curator, and published author. In her work, she is interested in exploring the intersection between art, law, and economics.
Originally from Bulgaria, Natalia lived in New York, where in the early 2000, she co-founded FLUX Art Space – a pioneering art organization that commissioned and produced long-term art projects, claiming the intersection of art, technology, and civic engagement. In the beginning of her career, Natalia worked at MoMA PS1 and Clocktower, both located in NYC.
Ivanova is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards in recognition of her contributions to the art and culture field. Her essay "Reframing the Value of Art and Fair Labor in the Context of a Sharing Economy" was published by the Journal for Aesthetics & Protest, Shareable.net and Project Kalahati.
She holds a BA in Criminal Justice, MA in Art Market, and MBA in Media Management.
Maymanah Farhat
Chief Curator/Visual Art, Pro Arts
Maymanah Farhat is a curator and writer working between New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. She has organized exhibitions in museums, university galleries, and nonprofit art spaces since 2006, notably at the San Francisco Center for the Book, the Center for Book Arts, Manhattan, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Arab American National Museum, Art Dubai, Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar, and Beirut Exhibition Center.
Mollie Underwood
Publisher, Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS
Raised in Nevada City, CA, Mollie Underwood has been printing in Oakland for over 6 years. She is a member of Irrelevant Press (est 2014) and Pro Arts Commons Press (est 2020). Her expertise lie in pre-production and InDesign.
Mollie is deeply committed to community and collaboration, always willing to share her printing or bookmaking skills and encourage new zinemakers to create work. Her own written work gently articulates the harsh realities and frequent mundanities of life and, in addition to Irrelevant Press publications, has been published in Oatmeal Magazine, Young Hots, and Be About It.
Damon Lamont Hooker
Resident Artist, Pro Arts
Damon Lamont Hooker is the Director of HOOKER BOY FILMZ ™️, an underground legendary, established in Oakland in 2004. He studied Script Writing/Directing at Laney College.
WATCH ALL EPISODE'S OF EVOL THE SERIES HERE.
Michael Daddona
Curator, Pro Arts Hybrid Series
Michael Daddona, is a sound, visual, and performance artist currently based in Oakland, CA. In his work, Michael explores the relationship between sound, the body and the exterior space in which sound exists. Through high tension multimedia performance, video, photography, sculpture, and curation, Michael Daddona explores the negative spaces of our perceived realities, and the social and physical spaces that surround us. Michael also curates the RATSKIN Records imprint.
SAAM NIAMI
Writer & Editor, Pro Arts
Saam is a creator with a skilled history in writing, editing, podcasting, reporting, researching, creative consulting, and platform building.
He is currently an arts writer for Office Magazine in New York City. He also serves as an editor for the Pro Arts COMMONS Press in Oakland, CA.
He is an alumnus of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he received Honors in English Literature for his poetry thesis about Persian literature and post-colonialism. Saam served an Undergraduate Fellow at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities Graduate School.
He has founded, organized, and written for a multitude of publications, including the community publishing house Project Kalahati based in Oakland, California. He was a reporter for GroundUp News in Cape Town, South Africa where he covered human rights, education, global warming, and politics.
His interests include art, post-colonialism, Middle Eastern art and culture, political theory, media theory, social theory, corruption, fashion, history, and Orientalist theory.
Jae Daaboul
Development, Pro Arts
Jae Daaboul is a freelance writer and editor. Born in South Korea and raised in Berkeley, he has lived in the Bay Area for most of his life, working at small, communally owned restaurants and bars around Berkeley, SF and Oakland for his livelihood.
Jae’s expertise is in writing and language arts, particularly that literature which tells the stories of historically marginalized and obscured U.S. communities. His love of Oakland is rooted in the unique artistic identity, its social openness, and willingness to always become more inclusive.
Sam Lefebvre
2020 Writer & Editor in Residence, Pro Arts Print Publication Project
Sam Lefebvre is a freelance writer and musician in Oakland whose journalism and criticism have appeared in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wire, Pitchfork, the Believer, the Fader, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and SFMOMA's Open Space. He has worked as an editor, reporter and columnist at KQED Arts, the East Bay Express, SF Weekly and Impose Magazine. His accountability reporting has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and in 2020 he won a Rabkin Prize for Arts Writers.
As a writer in residence at Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Sam Lefebvre is creating a print publication to critically examine the forms of cultural expression, socialization and solidarities to arise from these turbulent conditions in and around downtown Oakland over the course of 2020.
Dena Al-Adeeb
2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Dena’s artwork takes on varied practices including video, installation, photography, sound, writing, participatory performance, and socially engaged projects. Her conceptual creative practices shed light on personal as well as collective narratives and experiences of displacement, memory and trauma. Concerned with dis/embodied experiences and the ways these resonate across fragmented encounters of time and space, her art practice foregrounds my personal and scholarly background. She is currently a University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow.
Julia Choucair Vizoso
2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Julia is a writer, editor, translator, and political scientist. She is interested in building social alternatives for artistic and scholarly production premised on less alienated forms of creativity. She is from Beirut and lives in the mountains of Madrid.
Marissa Friedman
2020 Project Resident, The Community Self-Defense Archive by MUSIC RESEARCH STRATEGIES
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Marissa received her B.A. in History with Honors from University of Puget Sound, her M.A. in History (emphasis in Public History) from University of California, Riverside, and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Her background includes a diverse range of experiences in archives, oral history, public and special libraries, and museums. She is particularly interested in community archives and the intersections between digital collections and archival activism. Marissa works as a Digital Project Archivist at University of California, Berkeley.
Tanya Hollis
2020 Project Resident, The Community Self-Defense Archive by MUSIC RESEARCH STRATEGIES
Currently, Tanya Hollis is serving in her twentieth year in California archives. She has worked as a librarian and archivist at the California Historical Society, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University.
In all of these positions, she has been engaged in every aspect of archival processing, from appraisal, accessioning and processing to preservation and digitization, and has been a successful leader at each institution through the transition from paper-based archival description to open online access.
Tanya is a Special Collections and Archives Coordinator and independent visual artist living in San Francisco.
Paulina Borsook
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
Paulina Borsook has shared her fiction, essays, humor pieces, and journalism through Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The New York Times, Architectural Record, San Francisco, Salon, Suck, and Feed, and is the author of the acutely insightful Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (PublicAffairs, 2000). Borsook has been variously described as “The grande dame of digital culture” (UK Independent), “a bohemian intellectual displaced into the world of Silicon Valley high tech” (Worth Magazine), and as someone who has made “a fine career out of challenging, rebutting, baiting and vexing the conspicuously libertarian technology community (Salon Magazine).
For the last few years, Borsook has been developing My Life As A Ghost, a multi-disciplinary art project on traumatic brain injury. As part of this project, she was Researcher in Residence at Stanford Art Institute in 2013, where she researched ‘the psychoneurological consequences of traumatic brain injuries, drawing from her own experiences and interviews with other individuals living with TBI.’ In 2011 she was awarded first place in the SF Chronicle’s Chronicles of the Bay. Borsook has orchestrated street theater and townhalls; produced and performed in works-in-progress events; helped run a concert series; has an undergraduate degree in psycholinguistics with a minor in philosophy from UC Berkeley; and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University.
Zeph Fishlyn
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
A Burial Ground project
Zeph Fishlyn (pronouns they/them) is a white Canadian-American queer artist who uses social practice, drawing, object-making, and installation to nurture alternative narratives by questioning, dreaming, distorting, celebrating and demanding. Their most recent work explores absurdity, embodiment, intimacy and playfulness as foundations for resilience, creative subterfuge, and action in the face of overwhelming circumstances.
Zeph is a serial collaborator with groups inventing creative responses to our urgent times—including the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Heart of the City Collective, the PDX Trans Housing Coalition, Greenpeace, and the Center for Artistic Activism. Zeph has been awarded residencies or fellowships with the Reimagining Value Action Lab, Banff Centre for the Arts, Emerging Arts Professionals, Ponderosa Stolzenhagen, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Queer Cultural Center.
Ryanaustin Dennis
Curator, Pro Arts
Ryanaustin Dennis is an Oakland-based curator/artist/writer/cultural strategist. As the former founding member of The Black Aesthetic, a curatorial collective, their practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance, film, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness.
They have done curatorial work for E.M. Wolfman Bookstore, Kadist, SFMOMA Open Space, Eastside Arts Alliance, Betti Ono, Soundwave Biennial, and is a Southern Exposure Curatorial Council Fellow. They currently co-curate the Black Life series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and is a co-founder of a small press, Pro Arts Community Press at Pro Arts Gallery and Commons
SADJI
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
Sadji has been an unhoused artist member of our Pro Arts team sine early 2019. He is a dancer and creator with business knowledge and gallery management skills.
You can find him dancing his new moves at Pro Arts or at Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland, CA.
Akili Simba
Director, Gift Shop @ Pro Arts
Akili Simba is a mixed media artist based in Oakland, CA. His interdisciplinary practice embodies resource recovery.
Abandoned and recycled materials, sourced throughout the Bay Area, are used as an act of environmental conservation. Inspiration is rooted in traditional African culture and folklore. The works reflect on value and self worth to promote pride and unification.
Marshall Trammell
Music Research Strateges
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
Marshall Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, composer, and self-styled Music Research Strategist. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions and generate new local and global ecologies that embrace improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries.
Trammell’s ongoing Music Research Strategies project uses political aesthetic theory, data creation, mapping, and collective music-and-artmaking in order to step out of the domain of traditional cultural institutions, relocating the act of co-production back in the community. Music Research Strategies is a performing-political education platform for embodied social justice vernacular, organizational strategy, and alternative infrastructure development.
Christian Johnson
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
Born in Oakland California Christian Johnson is a writer, image maker, and film curator. His work aims to create multi-layered revolutionary images of the black body in motion.
Marc Herbst
2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Marc is a co-founder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, an interdisciplinary journal and weirdo collective founded in Los Angeles in 2001. (www.joaap.org) He recently completed a PhD at Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies in London with a study titled, A cultural policy for the multitude in the time of climate change; with an understanding that the multitude has no policy. Marc’s collective and individual efforts are also interdisciplinary (between engagements with the formal art world, DIY networks and relatively autonomous political projects) and he works between publishing, social practice and illustration.
As a publisher/editor, he works with Aesthetics & Protest and also is recently collaborating with Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, Pluto Press and Canary Press. With the Aesthetics & Protest editorial collective, he is currently editing an issue working with anti-fascist and avant garde art collectives on situated practice outside of but in awareness of the mediating practices of political and cultural structures. He also helped publish recent books on precarious labor with the UK-based Precarious Workers Brigade, and (related to his PhD) a book on housing rights activism and transversal urban organizing by Ada Colau and Adria Alemany. As a writer, he is working on texts for Blade of Grass, Field Journal and also Dispatches Journal on his very mundane not-art-but-creative/salaried work with refugees in Leipzig, and NGBK/ADOCS where he is co-authoring with Michelle Teran a book based on situated, cosmopolitical and eco-social learning through the coming 99 years of climate based in the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin.
Arlin Golden
Movie Friends project @ Pro Arts
Founder & Director, Drunken Film Festival (DFF) Oakland
Arlin Golden is an all-around film person in Oakland, CA. He received his BA in Film Studies in 2010, is a documentary distributor and filmmaker, and runs Drunken Film Fest Oakland.
He rarely dreams, but the most frequent ones are the ones where it's finals and he hasn't been to class all semester. He hopes one day that the world recognizes the many values of the siesta system.
Michael Grayson
2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Studiomike is one of West Oakland’s most popular producers. He has worked with artists such as 4 Tay, Steady Mobbin, D-Lo, HD of BF and more. Producer, vocalist, engineer, SoundTrack Designer and most of all an advocate for the hungry and underprivileged artists. He started his own record record Label SCENT LLC, to ensure no one gets played in the music world.
Scott Ortega-Nanos
Publisher, Project Kalahati
Scott Ortega-Nanos is a bookseller and community organizer in Oakland. His work explores the numerous ways in which books can be used as tools for resistance and liberation.
In 2014, he started a yearlong project operating a community bookstore inside a building scheduled to be demolished for new condominiums. In early 2018, he (alongside founder Akande X,) helped start Maji Press, an Afrofuturist community newspaper. In 2019, Scott was an exhibiting artist in the SOMARTS exhibition “Reorienting the Imaginaries,” which premiered his mixed-media installation, “Pasyon: a Heuristic Pedagogy.”
Danielle Luz Belanger
Project Kalahati
Danielle Luz Belanger is a community organizer and creative who utilizes film, writing, dialogue, and action to center political possibility in everyday life. Focusing on the radical potential of memory and dreams, her explorations range from reconstructing inherited narratives to envisioning futures through an internationalist lens.
Her newest release, Rememory (Project Kalahati), is a chapbook of photographs and prose examining the vital space of the ‘between’ within a Filipino diasporic context. danielle has served as International Solidarity Officer of GABRIELA Oakland since 2019. She currently works as an Associate Archivist at the Freedom Archives and is a 2020 recipient of the Spectrum Scholarship (American Library Association).
Praba Pilar
FELLOW
Artist in Residence, Pro Arts
Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ Over the last two decades Pilar has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, street theatre, invisible theatre, electronic installations, radio programming, digital works, video, websites and writing. These projects have traveled widely to museums, galleries, universities, performance festivals, conferences, public streets, political meetings, bookstores, bars, and radio airwaves around the world.
Kate Spacek
2019_2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Kate Spacek is fueled by People and Possibility. She designs and facilitates co-creative experiences that foster belonging, agency, and ownership. Diverse groups of humans make something together, tangible or otherwise – and open to one another in the process. The secret sauce always includes art, movement, and/or play, and transforms “non-artists” to connected creators.
Kate’s former life includes two decades of business operations and strategy with proficiencies in personal development and group facilitation. This rare blend adds structure and sustainability to her arts-based programs and actions. She has co-produced interactive art-centric events for Red Bull, General Electric, City of Oakland, Google.org, Autodesk, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and others. As Director of American Arts Incubator at ZERO1, Kate bridged program artists, overseas partners, participants, and the U.S. State Department to explore social challenges via 65 community-driven creative projects in 13 countries. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio (NPR), Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and various television, radio, and print media outlets around the world.
Benj Gerdes
2020 Artist in Residence, COMMON Knowledge Platform
Benj Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in video, film, and related public formats, individually as well as collaboratively. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. His projects emerge via multiple articulations from long-term research processes conducted in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, urbanists, geographers, and archival researchers. Exhibitions and screenings include the Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art (U.S.), New Museum (U.S.), Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the Tate Modern. Publications include October, Public, The Journal of Aesthetics + Protest, Incite! and Rethinking Marxism. He currently leads a professor group and seminar on logistics and infrastructure at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and is based in Sweden and New York City.
OAKLAND FREEDOM JAZZ SOCIETY (OFJS)
OFJS helps cultivate contemporary music future seeds to become tomorrow’s master improvisers. We provide a safe space to test new ideas & concepts in sonic experimentations. Established in 2012 , OFJS has produced over 450+ concerts, from Master Improvisers World Wide to providing a space for new student works from Mills College Contemporary Music Program for Improvisation & Electronics Music.
QUICC
Queers United in Community Care is a queer-led mutual aid and street medic collective, based in Oakland. We work together to provide first aid, food, and supplies to communities in the Bay Area. We stand in solidarity with movements working to liberate and center oppressed lives and voices.
Chica Okoye
Oakland Summer School
Chika Okoye is an independent scholar who focuses on histories of Black liberation struggle. She co-founded and for two years co-curated the Black Life series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), a monthly live event that showcased the work of Black artists and intellectuals. Chika currently works as Program Director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a nonprofit that seeks to enhance the spiritual grounding and power of activists and movements working for progressive change.
Grant Kerber
Oakland Summer School
Grant Kerber is writer, community organizer, and designer. He is one of the myriad voices behind Oakland Summer School, a community education project. He runs Jet-Tone Press, where he co-edited and published Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (2019), and also co-edits and designs the periodic film journal The Movement Image. Grant lives in Oakland with his cat, Roy Batty.
Melissa Mack
Oakland Summer School
Melissa Mack (she/they) is a poet, writer, organizer, and, in their day job, researcher. They have been participating in autonomously organized free community education for at least 10 years, mostly recently for the Oakland Summer School (2017-present). They are the author of The Next Crystal Text (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017), Includes All Strangers (Hooke Press, 2013), and their work appears in print and virtual journals, anthologies, and ephemera.
Akande X
Oakland Summer School
Akande X is a California-based writer and researcher of philosophy and literature. He is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow who has graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in philosophy. His research interests include philosophy of cognitive science, affect, and anarchism. His other interests include hiking and tending to his budding garden.