The Healing Project Exhibit comes to North Oakland for May’s Freedom Friday!

Join us for Freedom Fridays on May 27 where abolitionist artist Samora Pinderhughes invites us to explore questions of survival, healing and freedom through film, music, visual arts and community in his exhibit, The Healing Project.

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change and works in the tradition of the black surrealists throughout the African Diaspora, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison and police abolitionist, an anti-capitalist, and an advocate for process over product.

At May’s Freedom Fridays, Pinderhughes will be sharing audio and visual excerpts of The Healing Project (currently on exhibit at YBCA), a body of works rooted in interviews and relationships that have been fostered since 2011 and formed by over 100 storytelling and artistic collaborators. At the center of the project are the intergenerational voices of individuals across the country, including folks incarcerated in prisons and detention centers. Their stories, experiences, and ideas serve as the foundation for The Healing Project’s vision for societal transformation.

“This is a spiritual project. It’s about the deep levels we must access to get through the things that hurt us in life, about how much our current and historical US systems (particularly the prison industrial complex) rob us of all the true ways to take care of ourselves and each other; and about how the folks who truly have all the answers we seek are the very people who are never given the power in our society.”

– Samora Pinderhughes about The Healing Project exhibit at YBCA

May’s Freedom Fridays Schedule:

• 7-8pm Community gathering + Music
• 8:00pm Artist Conversation
• 8:30pm Short Films/Audio Screening

Freedom Fridays are free and intergenerational gatherings with ADA restrooms available so tell a neighbor, bring a friend, bring the whole family!

Warm drinks provided by Hasta Muerte Cafe. Limited seating provided. Bring a blanket and  warmth for Bay Area evenings. See you there! 

What are “Freedom Fridays”?

Freedom Fridays is a monthly socially-distanced community event series at 4400 Telegraph Ave (in the back lot on 44th) where we put prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition into practice through organizing and community engagement. The events are an opportunity to bridge the organizing work of movement partners and Critical Resistance to the Oakland community, specifically the North Oakland neighborhood, and to people inside prisons. We are fighting to increase urgent anti-prison organizing in this time, create and strengthen our movement space, and fight with and for people on the inside and build our collective people power. Come join us each month!

Critical Resistance started Freedom Fridays in December 2020. Read more about the first year of Freedom Fridays, including a summary of each monthly event for 2021, here.