On Oakland Art Murmur’s fringes the unofficial artists make a presence, pinning their works up on chain-link fences, laying them on the sidewalk, or performing with their feet in the gutter. They don’t have the empty spaces and white walls found in the galleries outside of which they squat, or the refined sensibilities (learned from Art Forum and MFA programs) of the artists who work inside them, but the street is properly theirs.
Class disparity exists even among the struggling ranks of Oakland artists. Co-op art spaces and galleries feel hygienic, the art conceptually overwrought and ultimately boring, compared to the Telegraph St. sidewalk where the notably mixed race kids who were born into this city – unlike those who have gentrified this particular neighborhood — are drinking booze out of bottles and smoking weed by their proudly displayed work. The charm of youthful art in a city like Oakland lies in the squalor of its practitioners and their apparent pride in this condition. The art is visceral and non-academic. It references the world without an ironic nod to materiality as a philosophical category. In other words, it is wholly of its element: life in Oakland.
