about the project
Development has come at a high price of Black health and prosperity. We're seeking to reclaim our legacy by reclaiming the urban landscape. Cultivating community ownership and creative control in real estate is our biggest aim for solutions.
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Oakland, California will be the focus in the first wave of our project. Beyond, we are already making plans to take the project to other cities across the US and across the globe.
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Stolen Legacy Project is a project of the Alena Museum, an Oakland-based organization that challenges the erasure of Black culture in Oakland. Alena does this work by activating creative spaces and provide artists work and exhibition space that celebrates studios to cultivate the cultural richness of the African Diaspora.
role of alena museum
Alena Museum is making urban renewal history accessible by taking Black-centered art experiences into the public landscape where communities are impacted. We are creating space for reassessing how cities are being made, and the repair that must be done to create the landscape of the future that would give us the opportunity to thrive.
THESIS + PREMISE
After being dispersed to new places, the Black Diaspora’s severance from the motherland set the tone for land instability. The inferiority projected towards Blacks, planted the seed for reaping generational damage, taking a toll on the soil where liberation could’ve been nurtured. Black interests have been buried by systematic oppression; our growth as a unified people is threatened by displacement. Valuing property over human life, is a diss to Black community that disrupts prosperity. In our urban settings, interwoven relationships mended our ability to thrive in unknown land and sewed the seams for a future of black excellence. Being broken up in America is a mirror to our history. Our need for reparations is not solely for being taken from our land, but for repairing community after government sponsored erasure of Black Land.