South Berkeley neighborhoods are adorned with Edythe Boone’s signature, which dots the many walls where she has rendered its residents, relationships and beauty in street-side murals.
Boone lived, worked as an educator and created art in Berkeley for nearly four decades. She moved to Pittsburg last year to be closer to her family. But their building was sold, and for the first time in her life, Boone said, she doesn’t have a stable home.
Now, a team of her friends and local supporters are trying to find her a permanent home to secure her future. Most importantly, Boone wants to continue practicing art in her beloved community.
“My art matters because it’s part of me,” Boone said last week, seated in the home of Kim Anno and Ellen Meyers, a couple who have known her for decades. “It’s part of the history for my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
With the help of a successful donation page that Anno launched in mid-February, Boone is now living in a short-term rental in Berkeley. But most of her possessions are in storage, and the process has been exhausting for her.
“I’ve been going from one friend to another, and my family wants me to come and stay with them, and I’m getting tired,” said Boone, whose family doesn’t currently live in Berkeley, where her core community is located.
Anno and Meyers are part of a five-person team working to get Boone into a safe and affordable home that suits her needs. She recently submitted an application for the 100% affordable Maudelle Shirek Community, currently under construction near the Ashby BART station, while friends search around Berkeley and Oakland to find a home if the application — which was one of thousands for the 87-unit building — isn’t successful.
Anno, a professor at the College of Creative Arts, met Boone in 1979 when the two were working at a mural collective that created work in West Oakland’s Acorn Projects. They have been involved in radical causes and advocacy for Bay Area artists together ever since.
“What we’re finding is that there’s no artist affordable housing, and there’s very little housing for someone who has memory issues but isn’t ready for full assisted living,” Anno said. “She’s kind of in this in-between zone, and that’s really a problem for not just for her, but for other seniors [like her].”
New artist housing projects in Berkeley and Oakland have been few and far between in the last few decades, but Berkeley has identified the need for workforce housing for artists in its plan to build 9,000 homes by 2031.
In a 2022 survey of 163 local artists across different disciplines, the city found 77% of those who rent were considered rent-burdened, meaning they spent at least 30% of their income on housing. In tandem with housing, the Civic Arts Commission suggested a pilot guaranteed basic income program for artists modeled after initiatives in San Francisco and Minneapolis that would prioritize artists who are Black and people of color, and provide them with a monthly, unrestricted stipend to cover rent and food.
Vital Arts, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 2016 Ghost Ship fire to secure housing for artists, also released a survey in 2022 that found artists throughout the Bay Area are at high risk of displacement.
Anno, who has been advocating for artists’ housing with the city of Berkeley, said an ideal home for Boone could be a vacant ground-floor commercial space in an area like San Pablo Avenue, that could be converted into an accessible, live-work unit.
Originally from Harlem, Boone moved to California with her family in the 1980s because, she quips, “I was cold!”
Her first Bay Area home was at the Cadillac Hotel, a single-room occupancy building in San Francisco run by “Father of the Tenderloin” Leroy Looper, and she eventually worked for Looper to support residents who were transitioning out of incarceration, drug use and addictions.
Boone began painting while she was still in New York, where she and others created what she referred to as “guerilla murals,” but her work bloomed when she arrived to the Bay Area.
In Berkeley, Boone was met with love, engagement and a vibrant community that made her feel welcomed. It’s still where she feels comfortable and embraced as an older Black woman, Boone said.
“Berkeley, to me, is a magical place. You can go outside and go down University [Avenue], and start a conversation,” she said. “Sometimes when it’s my stop, I don’t even want to get off the train, I want to continue my conversation with a stranger.”
These daily conversations on local happenings have informed Boone’s work, especially in her former South Berkeley neighborhood, where she led the creation of the 100-foot mural at the intersection of Ashby Avenue and Ellis Street, titled “The Invisible Becomes Visible.”
In it, she highlights figures who are deeply important to the local community, but may otherwise have been forgotten. That includes people like Joseph Charles, who waved to schoolchildren and passersby on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Oregon Street for over 30 years.
“He was an old, Black man who got recognized like presidents … and all these big people who get recognized all throughout the world,” Boone said of Charles’ portrait. “I choose people in my murals who I feel like have contributed in a big or small way.”
She’s also painted subjects close to her heart, and one local mural includes an image of her son — one of her five children — who passed away.
Her work has always been political, Boone said.
Boone’s deep archive of work, documented in a 2013 film, highlights poverty and racism, such as the “REPARATIONS NOW” mural on Ellis Street, calling for reparations for the descendants of Africans who were enslaved in the United States; the former “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom” mural near People’s Park; the “Maestrapeace” at the San Francisco Women’s Building and the “We Remember” AIDS mural in San Francisco’s Balmy Alley.
Even in a period of transition, Boone has projects on her roster, including two murals planned for Berkeley this year. As a former educator, her dream is to paint a mural of children, who have always inspired her, and one that consists entirely of elderly people to show that aging is natural and beautiful.
Boone is quick to mention the blessing of her loving community, one that allows her to move through a period of rocky instability and focus on the future. She jokes that when she passes, “Come early, because it’s going to be standing room only.”
“I want to be still what I am. And I still want to grow, and I still want to be an activist, and I still want be an artist,” Boone said of the coming years. “I want to have the same friends I have, and maybe even invite some more in. I still want to be with my family.”
“I still want to be able to think — a lot of my friends cannot think at this point. I still want to smell the flowers,” she added.
