Award-Winning Documentary Film ALICE STREET to Screen at the Architecture & Design Film Festival NY This Weekend
While street art is too often used as an avenue to gentrify neighborhoods, it can also serve – as depicted in Spencer Wilkinson ’s award-winning documentary film ALICE STREET – as a tool to empower, energize and unite members of diverse communities in their struggle against gentrification. In 2013, Chilean studio painter Pancho Peskador joined forced with Chicago-born aerosol artist Desi Mundo to create a four-story mural at 14th Street and Alice Street in downtown Oakland. Painted directly across from Hotel Oakland Village, a facility that provides affordable housing and services to hundreds of Chinese seniors, and the noted Malonga Center, a venue for African drumming, culture and dance performances, the mural — designed with direct input from the folks served by the neighboring sites — represented downtown Oakland’s diverse cultures. But by then gentrification had aggressively reared its ugly head. Local folks were concerned about being economically and culturally displaced