The Art Of Gathering
Reflections by People’s Kitchen Collective
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson and Saqib Keval are the co-founders of People’s Kitchen Collective. Sita and Jocelyn discuss “To The STREETS!” — a 500-person seated meal that took place in May 2018 in the streets of West Oakland. The event centered the shared struggle, resilience and healing remedies of people of color. The project grew out of the group’s long-running efforts to honor the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program, and was the culmination of a four-part meal series, “From the FARM, to the KITCHEN, to the TABLE, to the STREETS!”
Part of the series, “Four Artists on Creating Public Art With Impact”
Sita: For the past nine years, People’s Kitchen Collective has held a meal at the Life is Living festival to honor the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program. We serve a long line of 500 to 800 people in Little Bobby Hutton Park, a place with deep connection to the legacy of the Panthers. For years, Saqib, our co-founder, imagined a long table stretching down a few city blocks in West Oakland and how this could make an even bolder statement about how we can create public space when it feels like our access is so contested.
Jocelyn: We needed to reclaim the narrative of “farm to table” to acknowledge and re-presence the labor and lived experiences of Black and brown folks within that narrative. The STREETS! meal was the culmination of a four-part meal series that we began in 2017 and we called “From the FARM, to the KITCHEN, to the TABLE, to the STREETS!” FARM asked how our peoples have used farming and flavors as a way to create place in the face of displacement, KITCHEN sourced home remedies for physical and social illness and trauma, TABLE brought together communities affected by xenophobic immigration policies in remembrance of Executive Order 9066 and the present Muslim ban, and STREETS! created a public space for celebrating shared resilience in West Oakland.
Feeding A Community
Jocelyn: Anything that we did is not new. It’s an honoring of ancestral foodways and ways of being in community. We’re calling back to the past for help to create the future we want to see.
Sita: The Black Panthers have documents that they would send out saying if you want to start a chapter you had to start a Free Breakfast Program. In the list of staffing positions, the first one listed is crossing guards to help children safely cross the street to eat. These are young folks that are 19, 20, 21 years old who are organizing. I was struck by how holistically they were thinking about the barriers to food and getting enough food.
Jocelyn: There is this narrative around “food desert” or “food apartheid” and I want it to be more complicated than the binary of good or bad food. This food question is very much about access. It’s very much about stories of oppression, but it’s also about people that are given a little and make a lot.
Sita: Connecting intergenerationally is important to us. There was a beautiful moment with Karen Seneferu — she’s an artist, “The Black Woman Is God” is one of her projects. Right after the STREETS! meal Karen posted a picture of herself sitting and eating as a Panther cub at the Free Breakfast, and then a picture of her that was published in the East Bay Express of her eating at the People’s Kitchen Collective table in the streets. She captioned it, “Full Circle at the Table.” As Jocelyn says, those moments are at the intersection of history and legacy.
This food question is very much about access. It’s very much about stories of oppression, but it’s also about people that are given a little and make a lot.
An Intersectional Approach
Jocelyn: It’s no small deal to come into an area, go to community meetings and say, we’d love to host a community meal, but we don’t want to do it at you or for you. We want to do it with you. What does that really mean? To make this meal possible we had the support of people from within and outside of the community. We had over 120 trained volunteers. We had paramedics and security. We had all these folks creating as safe and intersectional a vessel as we could.
Sita: For an event of this scale, the city requires one security guard for every 50 people and metal barricades for street closures. Perhaps that’s one kind of safety, but it can also make community members feel unsafe or unwelcome. How do you navigate these requirements without escalating an emergency to the police? For instance, paramedics were not required, but we wanted them in place so that if something happened, we would be able to respond immediately.
There are no hard and fast rules around community safety. But it’s a conversation that’s important and one we want to have as we and other organizations work in public space. How do we not replicate the conditions that we are actively speaking out against, especially when it comes to police brutality?
How do we not replicate the conditions that we are actively speaking out against, especially when it comes to police brutality?
Creating A Lasting Resource
Sita: The way that we’re working isn’t so clearly defined as art, or as food justice, or as community organizing. It’s rare to find spaces where there’s room for all of that. That’s one of the things that I do really appreciate about the Open Spaces grant. It says, okay, we’re going to consider this whole range of work in the Venn diagram of art and social change.
Jocelyn: We have people say to this day, can we do that every weekend? Having a family reunion out loud, in the streets, is compelling and it feels like something to be duplicated over and over. We know that’s not realistic for us. That’s why it feels so important for it to be something that’s realistic for many different organizations to do and accomplish and in many different iterations so that we can keep creating that feeling, that opportunity for people to feel the joy and celebration within so much heartache and struggle.
Sita: We’re working on a book project. It’s part cookbook, part community organizing resource, part art book. How can we share what we’ve learned, and this experience we created, with more folks? How can this book be both inspiration and resource, for ourselves and others? How can we represent the choir of the voices in a book, both the struggle and the celebration of that?
Jocelyn: There’s a legacy to this meal as well, of the three of us — myself, Sita, and Saqib — collaborating with so many others to create a collective voice that rings louder than any one of us can possibly maintain without our ancestors’ hands at our back. Marvin K. White, who blesses our table to life at nearly all of our community events, is People’s Kitchen Collective poet and public theologian. For the STREETS! meal Marvin composed an original poem called “Gather Together.” This excerpt puts well the power and impact of our collective art making in public spaces.
. . .
be told we are sons and daughters
from a long line of
sons and daughters
we who have been taught to forget
are remembering today
and we will tell and retell
write and overwrite our stories
and our histories
and our recipes
. . .
gather together and call the name
until…
This post is part of a series of conversations on creating public art with impact.
Let’s Hear From Another Artist
- Reflecting A Neighborhood’s Dream: Joanna Haigood, Zaccho Dance Theatre
- Sounding The Alarm: Rosten Woo
About this series: The Kenneth Rainin Foundation worked with a professional writer to interview artists about their public art projects, the community engagement process, the lessons learned, and the lasting impact of their work. The artists’ thoughts are presented in “as told to” style narratives. By highlighting the opportunities and challenges of working in public space, as well as sharing the outcomes and insights gained from these public art projects, we hope to push dialogue and understanding forward. We invite you to read the interviews and then join in the conversation by responding to the posts.
Each of the projects featured in this series received funding through the Rainin Foundation’s Open Spaces Program.
