Osha Neumann makes a sculpture from leftover scraps of styrofoam, metal and wood. He is also an attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center, where he often defends the homeless.
Saturday was just another morning on the Albany Bulb.
Small waves crashed onto the land that juts into the bay. Tents plotting the territory of homeless people were scattered across the land, overlooking the bay with million-dollar views.
Osha Neumann makes a sculpture from leftover scraps of styrofoam, metal and wood. He is also an attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center, where he often defends the homeless.
Saturday was just another morning on the Albany Bulb.
Small waves crashed onto the land that juts into the bay. Tents plotting the territory of homeless people were scattered across the land, overlooking the bay with million-dollar views.
Amid the serenity of the Albany Bulb, periodic clangs rang out as an artist picked out scraps of metal to sculpt. For artist Osha Neumann, the Bulb is a sacred space where he has worked nearly every weekend since 1999, after he discovered the land through a homeless client.
As an attorney at the East Bay Community Law Center, Neumann frequently defends the homeless, often becoming very close with his clients.
"These relationships with some folks, they seem to pick me," Neumann said. "Even though I myself am privileged and have never been homeless, there's part of me that feels comfortable with the outsider who can't get it together."
Neumann, 71, never thought he would be a lawyer. After growing up in New York as "a timid, middle-class guy with no street experience," Neumann rebelled. He worked as an artist, and a political activist, and he co-founded the anarchist street gang the Motherfuckers in the 1960s.
Neumann lived in a commune in Northern California before moving to the Bay Area, where he continued his activism – he has been arrested over 20 times, including during a protest of the Iraq war and once when police raided People's Park. Neumann painted several murals in the area, including the mural on the outside wall of Amoeba Music on Telegraph Avenue.
By his 40s, Neumann hit a rut and lost faith in himself as an artist. With a master's degree in history from Yale University, Neumann surprised himself and decided to go to law school when he was 45 years old.
"It was very weird for me to be doing law -there are no pictures in law books," he said. "Law schools teach you to think like a lawyer, which I never wanted to do. I wanted to think like a human being."
Neumann now works with graduate students from the UC Berkeley School of Law and teaches them "stuff you can't learn in law school." He has even taken students to the Bulb to see the homeless there.
"It's a group that is so disparaged and friendless and powerless," he said. "I have a lot of experience of what it's like to be on the street and experience the power of the police officer and his capacity for brutality … If you're homeless, you can never escape that."
Although Neumann maintains a certain distance from his homeless clients, he is drawn to them and continues to fight on their behalf, crediting this to "an internal homelessness" he feels.
Back on the Bulb, Neumann – who uses leftover scraps of styrofoam, metal and wood from when the area was a landfill – blends in with its homeless residents.
Visitors appreciate his work. Observing a sculpture of a woman with her arms outstretched to the sky, Richmond resident Christian Chandler said he was impressed.
"If there's junk out here, do something with it," Chandler said. "I'd rather see sculptures than just trash, even if the sculptures are made of trash."
Neumann's son-in-law, Jason DeAntonis, said he likes the way he and Neumann – a "charming curmudgeon" – create art together on the Bulb.
"We always have good, deep conversations," DeAntonis said. "He taught me how to sort of be warm, how to be open, how to be vulnerable and also not to take shit at the same time."
Creating art can be difficult – normally, sculptures in a public space must be approved by committees and tested for endurance, and they cost thousands of dollars to construct. But Neumann finds comfort in the simplicity of creating art on the Bulb, even though it is technically illegal, as are the homeless living there.
"There is no really great way to live now. There is no way to live justly, tenderly toward all the people who deserve justness," Neumann said. "The best way to live is in opposition to all that is oppressive and destructive."
Originally published at The Daily Californian