inStudio: The Distance Between: Traveling Beyond Count Time
Program & Event Overview
Currently on view at Empowerment Avenue’s inStudio in Oakland, The Distance Between: Traveling Beyond Count Time brings together stories told through the work of Black currently and formerly incarcerated artists. Their work traces histories of enslavement and confinement alongside the realities of incarceration today, while carrying memory, endurance, and imagination toward something beyond them. Together, these works invite us to explore the space between captivity and liberation, to see differently, and to imagine a world beyond systems of punishment.
Saturday, October 3 | 12:00–5:00 PM
12:00 PM | Gallery Opens
On Saturday, inStudio will reopen for an afternoon of art, conversation, and community.
Open Flow: Community Dialogue
Throughout the afternoon, exhibition co-curators De’jon Joy and Christine Lashaw will host an open-flow community dialogue inside the gallery.
Rather than a traditional panel, the gathering will create space for visitors to move through the exhibition, ask questions, sit in conversation, and reflect together on the histories, ideas, and possibilities held within the work.
Currently incarcerated participating artists will also call into the gallery at various points throughout the day, creating opportunities for visitors to hear directly from artists whose work they are encountering on the walls.
The weekend invites audiences not simply to view the exhibition, but to spend time inside its questions: to consider what we have inherited, what we have normalized, and what becomes possible when Black artists are given space to imagine beyond captivity.
