Once a staple of the Bay Area’s cultural offerings, Oakland’s Art and Soul Festival could now be done for good without a major financial boost, which isn’t easy to come by in a city caught in a perilous budget crisis.
Organizers of the annual fest that flooded City Hall plaza with thousands of attendees for two decades say it is now endangered, with this September’s event canceled and next year’s highly uncertain. The celebration of local artists has been free to attend, but costs $150,000 to produce.
“It’s premature to say whether we’re going to be able to raise all that money to come back in 2025,” said Samee Roberts, the Art and Soul Festival’s founder and executive director. “We want to take the balance of this calendar year and into 2025 to regroup and fundraise and see what’s out there.”
The festival’s troubles this year mainly have to do with the debt it has accumulated, in part due to delays in Oakland’s grant funding for arts and cultural groups — a process that the city is trying to improve after a difficult year.
It also touches on what could be lost in Oakland as the city grapples with its deep financial woes, which this year amounted to a $177 million deficit.
Tax revenue from home sales, business licenses and hotel stays have repeatedly fallen short of officials’ projections, leading Mayor Sheng Thao to propose a large series of cuts to the city’s two-year, $4.2 billion budget in order to avoid direct layoffs.
That would include freezing two vacant positions in the city’s Cultural Affairs division, which Thao’s proposal — set to be voted on by the City Council by June’s end — states would “extend the turnaround time for getting checks out to community grantees.”
They also would slash a fund for cultural grants by nearly $700,000, a 41% decrease in available funding for arts events.
Community members take part in the 21st annual Art & Soul Oakland festival on Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023, in Oakland, Calif. The free event offered roller skating, food, informational booths, cosplay contest, and musical performances. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Art and Soul has a number of cash sponsors, such as PG&E, Xfinity, Visit Oakland and the city’s downtown improvement district, but none has offered enough money to cover the festival’s costs.
Besides playing host to major live acts, the annual festival has since 2001 staged artists with strong ties to Oakland, such as MC Hammer and Sheila E., in front of diverse crowds of longtime fans who otherwise couldn’t shell out the money for tickets.
“This is a huge cultural loss for Oakland,” Roberts, the festival founder, said. “It became an iconic annual tradition for Oakland residents and visitors from all over the region and beyond.”
The festival’s lineups also platformed indie artists, allowing a less commercially viable genre like gospel to fill downtown Oakland with its sounds for a weekend.
“It was always a huge honor to perform at Art and Soul,” said Kev Choice, an Oakland-based hip-hop artist who got his start performing on the festival’s smaller stages and opening for legacy R&B acts like Tower of Power and the Pointer Sisters. “There was always a lot of people I knew in the community who showed up.”
Choice said Art and Soul’s possible extinction has led local artists to consider the formation of other local music fairs, including a possible revival of Festival at the Lake, a predecessor event at Lake Merritt that was discontinued in 1997.
Whatever comes next, local organizers are increasingly wary of leaning on Oakland’s coffers for help.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – JULY 27: The Community in Praise choir perform during the Art + Soul Oakland event in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, July 27, 2019. The event featured music, dance, an artisan marketplace, craft beer, wine, food, a fun zone and performers on different stages. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
The city had once set aside $150,000 for Art and Soul in its annual budget, but during the pandemic officials sliced the grant funding to just $20,000 — which the festival now must apply to receive.
The grant was approved last December, but a technicality the city’s grant schedule meant organizers couldn’t receive the money in time to clear Art and Soul’s existing debts.
Oakland officials have since changed the grant schedule so it aligns with the regular calendar instead of the July-to-June fiscal year — a move that could make the process more flexible to sudden change.
Last month, the city emailed a flurry of local arts groups to inform them that a cumulative $1.3 million in promised grants was “tied up in the budget challenges” facing Oakland and might not arrive on time. After some backlash, the city reversed course, saying it would stick to the regular funding schedule.
Carla Service, who has organized and choreographed the dance stage at Art and Soul since its inception, recalled how the festival injected positivity into a town in need of it, with volunteers motivated purely by passion for the community event.
“Art and Soul didn’t appeal to just one audience — it catered to everyone,” said Service, who made it a mission to book dancers of various cultural trainings, from hip-hop to Filipino folklore to, on one occasion, a group that traveled from Tokyo to perform.
“We still hope it returns,” she added, “but if it doesn’t, that’s just really sad.”
