Arts & Entertainment

For the Ashland Youth Center, an Artistic Coming Out

As the Ashland Youth Center's public art process moves forward, a community comes out to share its dreams.

I want to feel like I’m invincible, and when I come in there I can achieve anything. 

I just want to feel like I can be myself.

I want to feel loved.

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It would be a tall order for any inanimate object, much less a structure whose first nails won't be hammered for months to come. But that didn't stop youth from across the Ashland-Cherryland corridor from dreaming about it. 

Dozens crowded the Ashland Community Center Wednesday night to share those dreams with five semi-finalists selected by a youth panel and the Alameda County Arts Commission to conceive much of the government-funded public art that will fill the Ashland Youth Center.

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"Something colorful, because no one likes something that’s dull," suggested 15-year-old Alyssa Nunez, who said she often stays late after classes at because there's nowhere else to go.

"It should be very inspirational words, and it should be historic people," another participant shouted from the back. "Martin Luther King, Mohammad Ali."

The meeting was a chance for the wider community — including plenty of adults — to hash out what might appear on the amphitheater stairs facing the outdoor stage and the walls of the interior courtyard.

But in many ways, Wednesday night's community roundtable was also a coming out party for the Center — a moment, however brief, for the community to project its multiplicity of dreams onto two stories of unbuilt air at the corner of East 14th Street and Ashland Avenue.

(The construction currently dominating that corner is not the Youth Center, Executive Director Pedro Naranjo was at pains to point out. It's 's new gymnasium.)

Though there's no building, Janice Le, one of the original engines behind the center, called its progress a miracle.

Naranjo disagreed.

"It’s not a miracle," he said. "I think it happened because of a lot of work. I know a lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this project, and are still going in"

With any publicly development, the object itself is only a physical manifestation of the force that propelled it into being. The Center is not the center. The neighborhood is the center. The art should represent them, participants said.

The Ashland Youth Center has the potential to "put Ashland on the map," District Supervisor Nate Miley has said, making it a destination for arts, culture, and future investment — the "build it and they will come" theory of community development.

For many of its most  ardent supporters, the building would be the definitive force behind an ambitious pivot for the area, from a largely forgotten corridor between San Leandro and Hayward into a hothouse of urban renewal.

Countless people in innumerable configurations are working toward the same goal, from ad hoc groups like and the , to institutions like the Deputy Sheriff's Activities League. But none has galvanized support and opposition quite like the Ashland Youth Center.

Some have expressed concern over how the center will fund itself once county cash runs out, or whether the money might not be better spent on economic development.

But many more seem to have pinned their hopes on the Center, its richly-rendered architectural drawings full of promise in the form of stages and studios.

The dream is not the stage, but the dances that would be performed there (after hours of practice in the center's dance studio, naturally). It's the health impact of having a safe place to dance at all.

The problem now is how to distill so many dreams and so much hope into 31,000 square feet.

"It's a good opportunity, especially for kids in this community," said Janee Smith, 19, an AmeriCorps volunteer and a youth representative on the public art panel.

Smith, who works for the Deputy Sheriff's Activities League, moved to Ashland from Sacramento's Del Paso Heights, "not the peachiest, rosiest place to be." She said she was inspired to see young people take ownership of their neighborhood.

"You can't change anywhere else until you change where you're at."


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