Piedmont’s Dearing Memorial Project designer explains his creative intent
By Lou Fancher
Displaying rare synergy, the long-held desires of a community, cultural practices and purposes of a design studio and the best timing and opportunity for action converge in Piedmont’s Sidney and Irene Dearing Memorial Project. Initiated by Piedmont’s City Council in May 2022, the public memorial that will be located in Dearing Park (the former Triangle Park) aims to address a multiplicity of factors, the foremost being acknowledgment of how the Dearing family’s lives, along with Black people throughout the Bay Area and across the country, were impacted by racism. Redlining and racist real estate covenants in 1924 resulted in mob intimidation at the Dearings’ Piedmont home, where bombs were later reportedly found on or near, and the family eventually sold their property at 67 Wildwood Ave. to the city at a price far below its market value. Along with breaking the code of silence about an area still viewed as an enclave for wealthy people where most homeowners are White, the memorial carries a mission to be honest about the past and, more importantly, to move forward into new cultural territory and contemplation carried on fresh, authentic cross currents of possibility, says Walter Hood, Hood Design Studio’s founder and creative director. The Oakland-based firm was approached by the city of Piedmont to oversee the memorial project. Hood Design is recognized internationally as a leader in urban landscape design and heralded for work that draws upon the storytelling threads of communities — imagined and actual history, hidden mythology, less-heard voices, buried memories and secrets and cherished rituals and traditions — that are woven into the unique landscape and geology of each of the firm’s project sites. Hood introduced his work to the community in a kickoff event Nov. 7 at the Alan Harvey Theater. The well-attended presentation was the first step in a process involving Hood and his team developing design plans and drawings with members of the Dearing family and a Technical Advisory Committee led by City Administrator Rosanna Bayon Moore, Public Works Director Daniel Gonzales and Parks & Project Manager Nancy Kent. After receiving public input on preliminary designs, city officials hope to begin construction this coming spring. In an interview, Hood says the project held interest because it will “be in conversation” with the firm’s body of work. “Part of the ethos of our studio is this idea of storytelling and trying to elicit lost memories in the landscape,” he says. “This project sits within the context of our exploration and research over the last 30 years.” Hood says he’s currently “a blank canvas” but that he intends to approach the project as part of U.S. history while not erecting a monument that sits like a rock or a bench stuck in time and offers no ongoing, changing, creative or many-layered interactions. “We do make statements with our work about (historical events or movements), but we put them in current-day context because we have to live with these safe spaces and sites.” He notes that particular care goes into letting the work speak to people in multiple voices and experiences that convey history without just memorializing it. Hood says people can participate without compartmentalizing themselves into binary, restrictive responses, such as “this is not about me; it’s about them” or “that happened then, but I live now, so it’s not part of my life.” He says bifurcated options force people to disengage instead of being speculative. “We don’t want to do a shiny object, the kind of stuff that normative art looks like. This is a residential neighborhood, and I’m constantly thinking, ‘What would I want to experience? How do you make a space that is contemplative, where you don’t have to choose sides?’ “Two things can be true at the same time: Yes, there was redlining in all of our cities, but Black folk still progressed.” Hood says postcolonial culture should no longer be binary and that contemporary times are multilayered. A commemorative neighborhood space is experienced by a community performing patterns and practices of daily life. “Not everything is blazing, ‘look at me.’ There are places in neighborhoods that manifest themselves through ritual that people come to over and over again.” He thinks of plazas with fountains where people gather, or spaces in which a tree is planted whenever a child is born. People come to know whole generations of families and individuals in living, renewable, participatory places and to contend with memories or simply take daily walks, finding ritual through human connections. As an Oakland resident and a Black man, Hood says he “cannot separate my personal ideas from my work. (Yet) I don’t put my personal feelings and inclinations at the top, and I don’t rely on them.” That doesn’t mean Hood has nothing to say about redlining. “It is what it is — it’s the truth. Piedmont is a predominantly White enclave, but there are other small enclaves of upper Oakland that once had covenants. Piedmont redlining wasn’t isolated in the East Bay. We forget it’s only been a little more than 50 years that we’ve been legislated to live together. “For most of the last century, we were legislated to live apart. We made two different worlds. We think in less than 50 years we’re going to reconstruct and rebuild that, when there are all those ghosts still buried? ‘Separate but equal’ happened, and we look too often to tools like redlining. “People then didn’t want to live together, so we said, ‘Let’s build two schools, swimming pools, buses cut in half.’ We focus on tools instead of cultural setting. That’s what makes these projects difficult: We’re trying to get folks to just see things, to think they do want to live in a more diverse, complex world. “A homogeneous space is not sustainable; it dies or needs constant resuscitation. We know from nature that diversity is key.” Hood’s listening will be directed by respect and care for the Dearings’ descendants. He says he’s intrigued by discovering their stories and memories. “We’re talking about people’s lives, legacies and family. As a Black man, this isn’t something new. I don’t need to know what happened only in Piedmont, because it didn’t happen out of the blue. It’s an opportunity to work in communities like Piedmont that are ready to deal with those memories.” |