We, the artist of the younger generation, have grown impatient as the waters rise around us. The United States, in general, and Oakland, in particular, are facing an economic crisis that threatens to swallow us whole and the people are full of a righteous kind of fire. They want to move. We want to move. We are tired of being the mules of the capitalist crisis and have thus decided to ally with one another and fight back.

We are revolutionary artists. Meaning that we believe in the building of a new society through the will of the people. We believe that art must reflect and be apart of that. We reject the notion stating that “art cannot be political” if art is an expression of life, and if life along with its tribulations is political, then it follows that art, the essence of human expression and experience, is political.

Many revolutionaries do not see the need for art in a movement, or they reduce it to window dressing- something the put out before it’s time for the “real politics”. They are wrong and will be proven to be so through struggle. The magnitude of the effects brought on the people by White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism extend far beyond that of the material. The material oppression of the people is connected to the psychological/ cultural/ and spiritual oppression of the people. We oppressed by ideologies of race, and gender. And they govern the material nature of our lives in conjunction with the spiritual nature of our lives. One of the oppressors greatest tools is to rob us of our histories they see the importance in our lived cultures, in our created ancestries. Art, in the hands of the oppressed ,has always been used in the service of life. It has always inspired, touched deep into souls and played a critical role in the shapings of struggles. It would be ridiculous to deny that material fact.

We call ourselves Black, Queer, Womyn, and Brown artists very purposefully. It is understood that these labels often accompany exploitation, exoticism, and subjugation to and from the White masses. Masses, which wish to eagerly devour new cultural aesthetics marketed to them by the bourgeois media. However, we takes these labels back. We must re-establish our connections to our ancestors, Africa, and the universal spirit that moves us. At the same time, we refuse to allow ourselves to be boxed into the sub-categories that all drift beneath the body “classic art”. We are “classic” in our most authentic stages. If this is labelled a contradiction, then so be it.

We, in our understanding of society, seek to challenge the culture. We reject patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and the rugged individualism that helps the beast of White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism to thrive. We seek to challenge and be challenged. We seek to highlight and magnify the beauty of the downtrodden: the “Negro”, “Mexican”, “Whore”, and “Homosexual”. If our work is deemed vulgar, then we are moving in the right direction. “Vulgar” is a category used to police beings under the society’s current rules. The same rules which genocided the Native, enslaved the African, subordinated the Womyn, and criminalized the homosexual. We refuse to believe that there is anything amounting to decency in these “rules”. “Vulgar” is the name of the name of the righteous revolutionary.

We seek to empower the youth through revolutionary art. The political left is in a crisis. They are disconnected from the masses, because they hold to old dogma and speeches. We represent something new and fluid. We do not seek to hold onto to old ways of resistance when they are proven to be insufficient means of completing our historical task. We embrace new vibrant ideals that support class struggle and the liberation of all peoples. It is important for us to remember the traditions of Queer and Black struggles which boldly challenged what could be done in the fight against capitalism.

We are well aware that this road has been trod upon before and we are unafraid to ease on down it again. We welcome all to join us. We embrace the changing of this body. Change does not scare us. Revolution is a coming together of people’s not a separation of groups. We are a conspiracy, a thorn in the side of the bourgeoisie. In this space, we present our new proposition. We are an intersection of thoughts, aesthetics, ideas and dreams of the many layers of proletariat. We are the Corner Collective.