Live at 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.
Friday, October 2 | 1:00–9:00 PM
1:00 PM | Gallery Opens
Empowerment Avenue’s inStudio will open its doors at 1:00 PM, inviting visitors to experience The Distance Between: Traveling Beyond Count Time and spend time with the work throughout the afternoon.
Live at inStudio
6:00 PM | Panel Discussion: Black Yearning for Freedom
At 6:00 PM, we will gather for a conversation exploring a continuing Black yearning for freedom and the ways artists carry memory, history, our bodies, and our imaginations onto canvas and paper.
Moving between histories of enslavement and confinement and the realities of incarceration today, the conversation will consider art as a place to hold these experiences while also imagining beyond them. What does it mean to create from within systems of confinement without allowing confinement to define the limits of the imagination? What can Black creative practice teach us about freedom, possibility, and the worlds we have yet to make?
The conversation will feature exhibition artists Ray Williams Jr. and Alvin Smith, alongside exhibition co-curator De’jon Joy.
The discussion will be moderated by Milan Drake, Community Design Lead at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (the d.school).
7:00 PM | Live Performance by Inertia the Artist
Following the conversation, Inertia the Artist will offer a live performance in the gallery.
Inertia the Artist is an Oakland-based vocalist, loop artist, facilitator, and somatic psychotherapist whose soulful music and sound work center healing, transformation, and social change.
The performance extends the evening’s exploration beyond the visual, bringing voice, sound, body, and collective experience into the exhibition space.
