The Black New World

West Oakland-based artist, activist, and cultural historian Marcel Diallo and a few of his long-time collaborators transform the Room for Big Ideas into a sanctified outpost of The Black New World using assemblage altars, multimedia, and spiritual merchandise. The Black New World as a social aid and pleasure club in West Oakland serves the Greater Bay Area, yet the philosophical and spiritual reach of The Black New World, as the name implies, seeks to reflect deep Africa-rooted Diaspora culture at its freshest, most Now moment. To re-collect the scattered pieces of post-colonial Black New World identities and mix the gumbo until it’s good and ready is the underlying intention. From New Orleans’s Black Indians and Spiritual Churches to Secondline Jazz Funerals and Harriet Tubman; from juke joints and Orisha shrines to Marie Laveau and Doctor John; from hoodoo and conjuration to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; from Vodou and Toussaint L’Overture to Lukumi and Palo Myombe; from Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley to Candomble and Macumba; from Ifa, Ogboni, and Fela Kuti to Huey P. Newton, Patrice Lumumba, and Ngangas with their minkisi … Enter the Black New World, become a citizen, sit a spell, and sip a taste of that Sanctified Gumbo.

Marcel Diallo is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, poet, writer, cultural historian, and activist best known for his philosophies, writings, and public actions on Black self-determination and neighborhood revitalization through the resurrection and preservation of Black cultural districts. His role in the 1990s underground Bay Area arts scene transformed and popularized the call and response aspect of spoken word and blurred the lines between poetry, emceeing, and theater prior to the influence of slam poetry in the region. He is the founder of various Bay Area cultural arts institutions including Black Dot Artists, Inc., Black New World Social Aid & Pleasure Club, The Eastside Arts Alliance, and Cornelia Bell’s Black Bottom Gallery.