AfroPortals Pop-Up Activation: “Truth Tellers” with Nedra Williams and The Embodiment Project
Liberation Park, Oakland | Saturday, July 5 | 12–5 PM
Join us for the next AfroPortals Project Space and Archive activation featuring Nedra Williams in the Cosmos Portal with her pop-up exhibition, “Truth Tellers.” An Oakland-based visual artist and designer, Nedra’s abstract collages vibrate with spirit, color, and stories of the everyday sacred.
In the Gold Portal, The Embodiment Project will facilitate “What is Liberatory Storytelling?,” a live cross-continental conversation with portals in Johannesburg and Mexico City. Embodiment Project uplifts dance as a practice of resistance, collective healing, and social transformation, centering Black social dance and street dance as powerful modalities for change.
There will also be an Instagram Live conversation with Nedra Williams and curator Ashara Ekundayo on Wednesday, July 2 at 1:30 PM PST to explore Truth Tellers and share more about the upcoming activation.
This event is free and open to the community. All are welcome to come witness, engage, and be in conversation.
Nedra Williams is a visual artist and designer from Oakland, CA. Her works have graced album and magazine covers and continue to reclaim spiritual nuance in the Everyday. She is an abstract- collagist, who has a passion for color, line, and form. Nedra uses a variety of varied papers, fabric, stencils, and photography as her collage tools. She favors acrylics because it lends itself to layering and color boldness. As each layer unfolds, the viewer is invited into a deeper dimension of a familiar sign that can suddenly change into a new interpretive twist.
Embodiment Project’s mission is to uplift the ancestral and primordial power of dance as an act of resistance, collective healing, and social transformation. EP envisions a concert dance landscape that centers underheard and silenced stories, and advances society’s capacity for liberation. EP primarily seeks to serve and preserve Black lives and others of the global majority, survivors of sexual violence, youth, and those impacted by the carceral system. Their work honors and expresses Black Social Dance and street dance forms – recognizing them as powerful healing and social change modalities – while also drawing on other traditions, including modern dance, choreopoetry, documentary theater, live song, and video art to articulate and hold stories of liberation.