With support from the California Arts Council, HOPE MOHR DANCE’s Bridge Project will fund year-long Community Engagement Residencies for African-American artist-educator Jarrel Phillips and Nigerian-American artist-curator Chibueze Crouch to lead projects that counter the impacts of gentrification. Phillips will unite Bay Area Black and artist communities to challenge narratives that perpetuate their erasure. Crouch will run a curatorial platform for underserved early-career artists in Oakland.
Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.) creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. We are based on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have stewarded this land for generations and are still here.
Our arts and culture programming features an array of live performances, public dialogues, workshops, classes, and residencies that reflect the organization’s deep commitments to cultural equity, racial equity, and artist power. This programming includes a Community Engagement Residency offering year-long funding and capacity building support to movement artist-activists working in community.
In 2020, B.L.A. transitioned from a founder-led, hierarchical nonprofit to a model of distributed leadership. In alignment with B.L.A.’s core values, our way of working currently embraces shared leadership across all aspects of the organization, pay equality across artistic & administrative staff, and a re-imagined Board comprised of 100% working artists.