Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project: Creative Expressions, a Catalyst for Social Change

Race, Poverty, & the Environment's goal is to gather the creative works dedicated to Oscar Grant from artists, musicians, writers, photographers and others. Any form of creative expression will be accepted. It could be a video of a dance work, audio, song, poster, photo, art project, links to web pieces, etc.

Selected portfolio work will be featured in several Bay Area publications (print and online). If you have any questions or would like to contribute to this project please contact christinejoy@urbanhabitat.org. All submissions should be sent to artwork@urbanhabitat.org by March 21, 2009.

To view the project's beginnings please visit: http://urbanhabitat.org/rpe/oscar

For this project Media Alliance will act as a clearinghouse, collecting and archiving copies of the material and coordinating its presentation by partner publications including: Urban Habitat's Race, Poverty & the Environment Journal, Media Alliance, http://media-alliance.org, InColor magazine http://In-Color.net, and Street Spirit Newspaper. This work is supported by a grant from the Akonadi Foundation.

This project is co-sponsored by Media Alliance and Race, Poverty and the Environment.

Race, Poverty and the Environment is a project of Urban Habitat. Since, 1990 RP&E has been exploring issues at the nexus of race, class and the environment. Founded as a joint project of the Urban Habitat Program and the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, since January 2004 RP&E has been solely a project of Urban Habitat. Urban Habitat builds power in low-income communities and communities of color by combining education, advocacy, research and coalition-building to advance environmental, economic and social justice in the Bay Area.

Early morning on New Year's Day, 22-year-old Oscar Grant III was shot and killed in Oakland, California by a Bay Area Rapid Transit agency police officer. Grant was unarmed. The young black man's arms shackled behind his back. His face—pressed down against the cement. Onlookers video-phoned the horrific spectacle as his life was taken from him.