Reimagine HOW is Art produced, BY WHOM is Art produced, and WHERE is Art produced?

Performing Pro Arts COMMONS in Oakland, CA.

The Performing Pro Arts COMMONS Incubator’s mission is to incubate artist-led projects that enact, embody, and cultivate actionable social justice reform. Collectively we prioritize and value artistic autonomy, mutual aid between artists (reciprocity), dignified living, agency, and relational aesthetics.

Terrain: Art & Crisis, Print Publication

Standalone print publication incubated by Pro Arts Gallery & Commons critically examines cultural expression, mutual aid and unrest in downtown Oakland in 2020.

COMMON Knowledge Platform

CKP is a residency for an open knowledge production and exchange in the form of peer-to-peer artist collaborations, commissioned projects in research and print, and collective action through the medium of art and law that embody community self-defense ethos and philosophy.

The COMMON Knowledge Platform Residency puts artists and cultural organizers at the center of artistic and cultural knowledge production, and as the main instigators of civic and community empowerment.

PRO ARTS COMMONS PRESS

Pro Arts COMMONS Press supports critical discourse in the arts and culture via the production and open exchange of artistic knowledge. Our publications, zines, posters, pamphlets, and artist books embody a commitment to radical social change with the intention of creating equality for all.

Pro Arts COMMONS Press organizes printing and publishing workshops, prints FREE posters for all movements for social justice, collaborates on international projects, and shares material and immaterial resources and labor with our Affinity Groups in Oakland and beyond.

OccupyIP

**OccupyIP** makes art out of intellectual property (IP), utilizing law, Art, and economic supply chains as new media for political action.
**OccupyIP** empowers IP producers — artists, writers, scholars, inventors, anyone producing creative works — to activate the terms upon which their art enters the market in harmony with their radical politics. What happens when we turn a part of the law that has become sacrosanct across the world — the economic rights of IP producers — against its intended purpose? What if IP producers reclaim the legal and economic scaffolding surrounding their individual creative works to protect social actions, be in solidarity with workers in supply chains, or highlight the absurdity of maximalist intangible property?

MUSIC RESEARCH STRATEGIES

**musicresearchstrategies.info**
Marshall Trammell is the experimental percussionist and critical ethnographer known as Music Research Strategies (MRS). The identity of this arts engagement platform began as a critical ethnographic framework bridging obsessions with strategic, or compositional, improvising strategies, organizational improvisation and psychology, and street-level, social justice, international organizing. MRS navigates the global economy as a touring musician performing-research and -political education nationally and internationally through a battery of modular, social science-based systems producing works for fellowships, residencies, festivals, and investigations.

Community Self-Defense Archives & Social Impact Assessment (SIA)

The **Community Self-Defense Archive** is a grassroots, digital community archive experimenting in Intellectual Property Law. The project is managed by Music Research Strategies with the support of The Archives Support Team (AST).
The **Community Self-Defense Archive** partners with Mukurtu CMS, Reclaim Hosting, Documenting the Now, and CopWatch. Archives Support Team (AST) is comprised of volunteer archivists, Tanya Hollis and Marisa Friedman.
**The Social Impact Assessment (SIA)** is stakeholders’ development and program evaluation tool, designed and implemented by Music Research Strategies with the intent to document the progress of Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS process and institutional practice.

Everyday Disaster Research (Zeph Fishlyn)

How can participatory art strategies support our collective resilience in the face of escalating and overlapping crises? What is the role of play, ambiguity, and open-ended questions in addressing social, political and environmental urgencies?

Everyday Disaster Research explores the imaginaries of disaster as they manifest in pop culture, individual survival strategies, grassroots organizing, and the complex infrastructures of professional emergency management. Through this platform, artist Zeph Fishlyn offers creative experiments in disaster response, from the Emergency Dance Party Network, to Tenant Self-Defense workshops, to Evacuation Routes, a series of live, remote guided walks.

Zeph is also developing an Artists’ Emergency Response Cycle, a framework for how artists can leverage their specialized strengths to help reimagine the world in terrible times. (The Artists’ Emergency Response Cycle is part of this small book.)

COMMONS Planters

**RESIDENT PROJECT**
The goal of this project is not simply to beautify a space, but rather to draw in the eye, then the body, and finally the imagination. Everything about the piece is common, would-be refuse reconfigured. May it be a signpost to welcome others into the Commons, not just as consumers but as participants. May it inspires better builders and growers to reconfigure their own environments, to plant foods and natural medicines, to disrupt disconnection and dependency. May the idea of reclaiming and transforming the urban landscape in our own unsanctioned vision spread like crassula and tradescantia. Cut us back if you like, we will return tenfold.

MOBILE ART CARE UNITS

THE MOBILE ART CARE UNITS will travel to communities in Oakland, creating new sites for the production and exchange of artistic knowledge. This form of creative placemaking and public making will be archived audio-visually, creating as a result a library of peoples’ art and culture, and building tools for creative resistance and resilience.

KINDNESS GROCERY COOPERATIVE

**RESIDENT PROJECT**
**The Kindness Grocery Cooperative** is a hybrid cooperative grocery store that exists as a balanced alternative to profit driven businesses. Our cooperative emerges in the midst of a pandemic where food security, wellness, and stability are at risk. Our goal in building together is to provide the opportunity to experience and embody collective abundance. By supplying local food products, offering health services, and building with community, we create the chance to thrive in the midst of unpredictable environments.

Pro Arts Recording & Production Studio

With our new artist-controlled recording booth!

FACEBOOK PAGE