Spotlight Sundays: Community Conversations in Radical Public Imagining
Spotlight Sundays: Community Conversations in Radical Public Imagining
January 18 from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
OMCA’s Spotlight Sundays is excited to continue our Community Conversations series. This annual series, in partnership with The Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI), creates a space to foster public dialogue, deepen understanding, and cultivate connection around emerging community topics.
The year’s installment will explore radical public imagining. In alignment with OMCA’s special exhibition, Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain, project partners will include Dominique Walker and Alia Phelps of Moms4Housing, Brandi T. Summers of Archive of Urban Futures, and June Grant of blink!LAB architecture. Through performance, interactive engagement, movement, and conversation, this immersive experience will examine what it means to build our muscles for audacious dreaming during difficult times. Please join us for this inspiring event!
This program will be held in four acts, each including a TED-style talk followed by audience engagement. The schedule will follow a narrative arc, so arrive on time so you don’t miss out!
ACT 1 | Personal Engagement – Dreaming
ACT 2 | Civic Engagement – Agitating
BREAK
ACT 3 | Imagining Spaces – Transforming
ACT 4 | Archiving Futures – Remaining
This program is a part of our exhibition programming for Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain, on view through March 1, 2026.
About Richard Aviles
Transportation Analyst and Arts and Culture Strategy Lead for the Othering and Belonging Institute. As part of the Community Power and Policy Partnerships team, they support government agencies and partner with community organizations by providing trainings, technical assistance, and evaluation support. These services center the lived experience, vision, and self-determination of the communities most impacted by transit inequities. Richard has also created and facilitated healing circles in South Central as part of LADOT Vision Zero’s community engagement efforts. Richard holds a Masters of Social Work and a Masters of Urban Planning from the University of Southern California. Their current research interests lie in the relationship between behavior and the built-environment, city consciousness, and community engagement.
About Sangita Kumar
Sangita is a result-based organizational development consultant and somatic coach. She is the founder of Be The Change Consulting, a human-centered consulting firm that supports organizations and movements to bring liberatory practices into their work. She is the mama of an incredible 13-year-old and four chickens.
About Sarah Crowell
Sarah is OBI’s Belonging and Community Builder. She is a dancer and choreographer who has taught dance, theater, mindfulness, and violence prevention for over 35 years. She has founded and co-directed the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company and has served as the Executive Director for 30 years. Since 2000, Sarah has facilitated arts integration, violence prevention, cultural humility, and team building professional development sessions with artists and educators, both locally and nationally. She is the recipient of many awards including the KPFA Peace award, the KQED Women’s History Local Hero award, and the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone award. She is a four-time finalist for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education.
About June Grant
June received her Masters degree in Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture.
In addition to Architecture, her background includes Sculpture, Investment Analysis and Economics. Upon leaving Steinberg Architects and AECOM, where she was a Principal and Associate Principal, respectively, she launched blink!LAB in 2014. Her architecture follows a trajectory from retail to culture and technology markets. She is an architect with a long interest in the innovation of spaces for newly emerging social patterns.
About Dominique Walker
Dominique is a mother, as well as a fighter and organizer for social change. She co-founded her high school, the School of Social Justice and Community Development and went on to earn her B.A. in Sociology from Tougaloo College. Dominique has worked and supervised the lactation program at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, MS. She co-founded and currently serves on the Board of Directors for Moms for Housing (M4H)–a group of mothers fighting for housing and against speculation in communities. She is an active member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)’s Black housing union. She is the educator of community organizing for the Deep Medicine Circle (DMC)—a WOC-led, worker-directed nonprofit organization that is committed to heal the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, restoration, story and learning. Dominique is committed to fighting for justice at the intersection of housing and Black maternal health. She is currently a student at Berkeley City College.
About Brandi T. Summers
Brandi T. Summers, PhD is an Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Dr. Summers is author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019) and has published articles and essays that analyze blackness, culture, aesthetics, and urbanization, in both scholarly and popular publications. Her current book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City (under contract with the University of California Press), highlights routes of resistance and reclamation in her hometown, Oakland, CA, as a quest to think about the past, present, and future of a Black city.
Accessibility
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) is committed to providing programs that are accessible, welcoming, and inclusive of our community. Wheelchairs, sensory inclusive devices, and additional amenities are available for checkout on a first come, first served basis at the Ticketing Desk. To request other accommodations, like American Sign Language (ASL), Cantonese, Spanish or another language interpreter, please email [email protected] at least three weeks before the event. Learn more about our accessibility options.