Photographer Brittani ‘Brittsense’ Sensabaugh Revisits Her Oakland Roots

Last Saturday, over 26,000 fans pulled up to the Oakland Roots’ home opener at the Coliseum. And though the team lost 2-1 to Monterey Bay FC, fans took home a W for the culture.

After a land blessing from Ohlone tribal spokesperson and co-director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Corrina Gould, rising Oakland vocalist Ysenia Martinez sang the national anthem. DJ Fela Kutchii got the crowd dancing as the game started, and then at halftime West Coast hip-hop founding father Too $hort performed an anthem of his own.

After the game, a 15-minute firework exhibition lit up the East Oakland sky while some of the Town’s greatest songs played through the stadium’s speakers.

The opening night celebration is directly in-line with what the Oakland Roots, and their sister team, the Oakland Soul, have been doing since 2018: showing love to Bay Area artists and culture keepers. While it’s common for sports teams to highlight their region’s culture, this organization is truly putting on for the Town.

They have backing from legendary local athletes. They’ve showcased a wide array of artists, taken on philanthropic endeavors and gotten involved in the public school system.

At their next home game on March 29, the soccer club is set to host a Rooted & Rising: Women’s Empowerment Night, which will feature the work of renowned photographer Brittani “Brittsense” Sensabaugh.

Brittsense’s work features beautiful images of people from across the country, from housing projects in Watts to working class neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. She’s documented the brilliant culture that exists in areas that officials have deemed blighted — places that are over-policed, where schools are underfunded. Her body of work shows the beauty of Black folks, despite it all.

Her recent exhibition, Reach The World, But Touch The Hood First, is a series of images of babies smiling, little girls with colorful beads in their hair and young boys pausing while drinking from open fire hydrants. It’s been shown at galleries in New York and featured on MTA Subway advertisements.

But Brittsense, who moved back to California a few years ago after a long stint on the East Coast, hasn’t had her work shown in her hometown of Oakland in nearly a decade. So this weekend she’s calling her pop-up show at the Coliseum Return Home To Ourselves.

“I’m from 85th and D Street,” says Brittsense. “So the Coliseum is right down the block from where I grew up.”

The duration of a soccer game might be an unusually short time for an art show, but Brittsense says it’s a big moment nonetheless.

“It’s really like a homecoming, or a home welcoming game,” Brittsense says, noting the parallels between her journey back to home base and professional soccer’s return to the Oakland Coliseum — the place where, in 1967, the Oakland Clippers played in one of the earliest professional soccer matches in U.S. history.

Though not directly sports-related, Brittsense’s work is intertwined in another way. She calls the exhibition “a one-day spirit activation,” or “a ceremony reminding us of our traditions and the rituals that we come from.”

Edreece Arghandiwal, co-founder and chief marketing officer of the Oakland Roots, agrees. The team is showcasing Brittsense’s work to tell a story about art and Oakland.

“That’s the beauty of what [the Roots] are doing,” he says. “If we were just a soccer team, it wouldn’t make sense at all.”

Brittsense’s work will be displayed in the former site of an Oakland A’s merch store near section 105. The gallery is the brainchild of Roots’ Director of Community Engagement, Nelda Kerr.

“It’s kind of a flat-wall, bare-bones space,” says Kerr. When the team did a walk-through last year, she noted that it had potential and good lighting. “So I said,” Kerr recalls, “‘I’m gonna turn it into an art gallery.’”

During the first home game of the season last weekend, the space featured an exhibition called Faces of Fremont, a series of painted portraits from students at East Oakland’s Fremont High School. “I chose Fremont,” says Kerr, “because Too $hort was our halftime performer and he went to Fremont.”

In thinking of women who really showcase the strength of Oakland, Kerr says Brittsense absolutely encapsulates that. “And the power and strength of her photography,” says Kerr, “is just going to be such a surprise and delight for people who come to a game not expecting this kind of community activation.”

Brittsense’s display will be more than images; the photographer says it’s going to be a “holistic oasis” complete with candles and massage therapy. “I want safeness,” says Brittsense. “Protection and safeness for three hours.”

Acknowledging that people are dealing with a lot right now, be it local or national politics, family, financial or other concerns, Brittsense is clear that her craft can lend a hand to the healing process. “I document us from a lens of love and not trauma,” she says. “So, it’s just the beginning of a conversation for us to heal.”

A practitioner of the healing process, she’s also growing from her own wounds. She says this exhibition is her way to honor the legacy of her late mother who transitioned three years ago. “The love that my mother gave to me,” says Brittsense, “I gave to the world.”

Now she wants to use that love to cultivate safe spaces, where people can process and reflect. Currently, this is something Brittsense does in classrooms around Oakland through her work at the youth media nonprofit YouthBeat. And now that she’s broken the seal on exhibiting her work locally, she wants to do more of the same.

Ultimately Brittsense says — in a fitting metaphor for the Oakland soccer team — her goal is to get people to return to their roots.

She wants to remind people to dig deep within and “cultivate a blueprint of self” in order to heal from traumas they’ve experienced. “We have the tools,” she says, “because we are the tools.”

Brittsense’s exhibit ‘Return Home to Ourselves’ will be on display during the Oakland Roots’ game at the Oakland Coliseum on March 29.