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Armando Vazquez
By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor
The City of Oxnard announces in the past few days announce the formal rollout of the 2019-2020 Art in Public Places RFP. This is great news for the many artist and art organization that do their work in our community. This vital city grants program has helped hundreds of artist and arts organization with the ever daunting task of partial financing of arts project. This small invest for funding year 2019-2020 of approximately $170,000 dollars will partially fund approximately 60 to 80 individual artist and organizations.
I am in the initial stages of writing the official story of the Acuna Art Gallery and Cultural Center at the Café on A; A Story of Community Empowerment through the Arts. I hope to receive an artist/writers grant from the of Oxnard Cultural Arts Commission’s Arts in Public Places 2019-2020 funds that was just announce in the past couple of weeks by city officials. About a decade ago the Arts in Public Places program became a real and important community art funding program when the folks at the Café on A and other arts activist pressured the city council to use the funds for local artists and organizations. Since that time the Café on A helped over 50 local artists and organization complete the mandatory RFP, provide venue space and community promotion and support. For over two decades, unique, culturally and ethnically congruent art, educational and social justice ideas, movements, programs and activities that emanated out of Café on A were revolutionary and transformative for thousands of at-risk youths and adults, immigrants, campesinos, artists and other forgotten and marginalized populations of Oxnard who called the Café on A, a sanctuary and a home.
When the Café on A lost it lease at the end 2016, the city of Oxnard effectively lost its cultural heart and soul. We the Acuna Art Collective, the artistic benefactors and community activists and supporters of the old Café on A have been feverishly looking to re-establish ourselves again in the downtown area of Oxnard and so that we can effectively, from a centralized location, continue to provide arts enrichment and community empowerment programming at no cost to our community. Unfortunately the current state of the arts in Oxnard is in crisis again. In just five short years ago we were looking at an emerging culturally and ethnically congruent renaissance of sorts in Oxnard, today it is on life support.
Today, the Children’s Gull Wings Museum is boarded up and abandoned, the Carnegie Art Museum and the Performing Arts Center (PAC) are abandoned and closed. All these institutions are victims of the budget cuts decimate the “soft value” and defenseless city targets like the arts/cultural, recreation and parks to the tune of over $9million dollars this year in “mandatory” budget cuts. At the same time touching not one penny in the “hard value” community safety (police and fire) departments.
So we the arts and cultural community in Oxnard, like Sisyphus, must gather ourselves and get to the business of again pushing that boulder back up the mountain. All the while the new arts and cultural administrators of the city will invariably begin “importing “art and culture, because the “cannot find local artist or the local arts community” forgetting they played a very recent and major role in the decimation of the local art scene in the Oxnard community.
The recurring ever present truth in my fifty plus year of promoting, creating, writing about, growing, educating/getting by-in from the community, in creating the necessary critical mass to incite a local art renaissance must be a home-grown, organic and locally incubated partnership of disparate stakeholders (local artist, residents, CBO’s, businesses, students, supporters, city officials, colleges and local schools).
A local arts renaissance can never be imported, if this is attempted it will fail! This is why many of the arts and cultural ventures and efforts in the past in Oxnard have failed; art promoters, entrepreneurs, and city administrators in their sincere (?) yet limited local historical knowledge, expertise and understanding of the magical and delicate development and growth of the local arts invariably go for the quick and costly fix! Bring in a star artist, pay that artist and pray that this will inspire lasting appreciation and support for the arts. Importing art is by definition transitionally indifferent and foreign to the local community’s aspiration for a permanent, well defined, well-funded locally created and incubated art scene. The imported artist takes the money and runs, leave nothing but a one night stand and the city is left artistically/culturally with just that a memory.
Based on our extensive history we unequivocally believe that the Oxnard region has a uniquely creative and ethnically diverse world class concentration of talented artists. Because of our rich cultural abundance within the city there is no need to again seek outside of our community to “begin again” an arts renaissance in Oxnard, it is here already, all we have to do is make a concentrated effort to engage and support the artist. There is no need to travel outside the city to learn the “secrets of renaissance arts” success from other cities. Oxnard has the artists here, right now, who need to be supported right here in our community.
The Café on A/Acuna Arts & Cultural Center in Oxnard created an incredibly successful, democratic, important, culturally/ethnically congruent and eclectic template for art culture on the local level to flourish right here. So instead of spend our limited energy, resources and funds, we can achieve this sharing of cultural abundance here in Oxnard for just pennies on the dollar. We don’t have to look any further! The forgotten artists (many disciplines are richly represented) are here, creating magical art and are in desperate need to receive our local governmental and institutional support (in faith, money, locales, in-kind support).
We at the Acuna Art Collective (The Café on A) have been in negotiations, for the past 3 years, with varying amount of success in securing a downtown abandoned building from the city and begin providing our unique and transformative art, education, social justice and community services programs to our residents of Oxnard. Helps please write a letter to Alexander Nguyen, City Manager or Rosie Ornelas, Economic Development Manager and let them know that you the Acuna Art Collective (The Café on A) and support our relocation effort.
— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., founding member of CORE and the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Collective.