The Artists in Residence Program
The Betti Ono Artists in Residence program aims to ignite creative responses to critical humanities issues impacting BIPOC communities in the Oakland Bay Area.
Throughout the history of the program, we have explored challenges including racial justice, representation, forgotten histories, displacement and cultural healing. The incredible projects engage the community in immersive exhibitions, dialogue, listening sessions, public talks, direct actions, performance, and digital activations.
2024-2025 | AiR Inés Ixierda | Iweš-‘iweš kečkeyma: One Hundred Women | Photography by Ashley Salaz
Rooted in Betti Ono’s 15-year practice of building sites of cultural resistance, the AiR program is where BIPOC artists and communities (women, girls, gender-expansive folks, and male allies too) claim leadership, affirm their realities, and transform their communities. From this lineage emerges a collaborative, intergenerational, participatory model: artists, partners, neighbors, and accomplices in solidarity co-create to confront harm and prototype new possibilities.
In Oakland, culture-makers of color face entrenched barriers—sexism, under-representation, financial precarity, and displacement. The AiR program answers with a radical insistence: invest in the brilliance of historically excluded artists to advance movement-building, cultural memory, belonging, and liberation.
2024-2025 | AiR exhale. collective | one. black womxn breathing | Photo by Dorean Raye
How it works: Residents are embedded—not isolated—in movement work as agitators, strategists, painters, storytellers, designers, and culture-bearers. Through cultural equity and strategy, world-building, and narrative therapy, residents interrogate dominant norms and seed visions of care, freedom, and placemaking. The program centers public engagement, and each residency culminates in curated exhibitions, workshops, thought-provoking artist talks, captivating performances, and other neighborhood-centered events designed to deepen connections between artists and the communities they serve. These public engagements foster dialogue, inspire collective action, and create space for healing and empowerment.
Since its launch, the AiR program has organized nine-month paid residencies for Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists across visual art, performance, music, film, literature, and more. Residents are encouraged to work across disciplines, drawing on personal and cultural narratives to reclaim space and redefine what it means to thrive. Collectively, the program has engaged thousands of participants and forged partnerships with 20+ community organizations, extending impact well beyond any single artistic practice. The AiR program has nurtured hundreds of artists and engages thousands of local neighbors—strengthening the fabric of Oakland’s cultural and civic life. The model is replicable, designed to deepen relationships, invest in youth, and build the capacity of community leaders.
2024-2025 | Air Celia C. Peters | Next 15 Min | Photo by Patanisha Williams
The AiR program is a living call-and-response with our luminary James Baldwin, whose The Fire Next Time teaches that survival and thriving move through love, truth, and defiant creativity. In that spirit, AiR designs creative responses to the most urgent issues shaping our lives—and continues to queer the culture in ways that make Oakland, Oakland. Our paintings, music, poetry, and film carry us toward Baldwin’s vision: an existence rooted in love and free of fear—grounded in history, alive in the present, and building the liberated futures we deserve.