If recently you've either been on BART near in the vicinity of the Fruitvale station or driven along 880 in East Oakland odds are you've already spotted the big wide bright new mural bearing the word "DECOLONIZE" that takes up a wide wall at 12th Street and 16th Ave. The monumental mural is the latest politically charged artwork by the Community Rejuvenation Project (CRP). To catch the eyes of  the thousands of daily commuters that pass by the piece is strategically positioned near both the freeway and the BART tracks to get the message of the monumental mural to as many people as possible. “Decolonize is a universal message to all people of the earth to reconnect to their ancestry, the earth, to their traditional medicines and knowledge, and to a global consciousness that we are all related. Everyone on the planet has indigenous roots to somewhere,” said artist Lavie Raven - one of the ten contributors to the large scale mural that is 200 feet wide and 30 feet high and took two and half days of concentrated work to complete. The other artists are CRP regulars Mike 360, Release, Beats 737, Desi, Rate, Abacus, Pancho, Yesenia, and Dora.

If you've ever checked out the murals on the outside walls of the three Amoeba Music stores (Hollywood, Berkeley, San Francisco), you may have noticed a similarity in styles between all three. That's because the same two artists, Larry Smulian as designer and Brian Blesser as art executor, contributed their art to the outside of all three music stores.  "Larry does all our ad art, and Brian did our murals on the front of Berkeley way back when, and the side of Haight street, and the top of the front of Haight," said Amoeba Music's Marc Weinstein.

Note that these artists contributed to the Ivar side of the Hollywood Amoeba (not the Cahuenga side of building -- more on that art and the artist who created it in a later Amoeblog) and that they are not responsible for the graffiti art side of the Haight Street store.

Most of the pics displayed here in this BLOG are from the Haste Street side of the Berkeley Amoeba Music store and are chosen because they are among this blogger's favorites for many reasons, including the historical content's significance -- mainly the fact that they represent the period during the 1960's history of Berkeley's Peoples Park, which is steeped in radical political activism, not to mention that People's Park is directly behind Amoeba Berkeley in the same block bordered by Telegraph & Bowditch and Haste & Dwight.