(Re)Constructing History: Live

Inspired by (Re)Constructing History, this multidisciplinary program expands the exhibition’s exploration of photography as both record and revelation through poetry, spoken word, readings, and music. Taking the exhibition’s focus on layered histories of power, place, memory, and Black life as its point of departure, this event invites artists and performers to respond to the images on view and the stories they surface. Just as the exhibition considers how a single photograph can hold complicated, painful, and familiar histories within its frame, this program uses language and sound to further uncover what lies beneath the surface of the visible. Through live performances, audiences are invited to experience history not as fixed or distant, but as present, embodied, and continually (re)constructed.

About the Performers

Nia Pearl is an award-winning poet, writer, and environmental justice advocate working at the intersection of art, activism, and public engagement. She is an established host and event curator passionate about creating participatory spaces for creative expression and literary dialogue. Nia’s writing has been published in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets; Painting the Streets: Oakland Uprising in the Time of Rebellion; and terra:soul: echoes from the future ancestors. She is one of the recipients of the 2023 Nomadic Press/San Francisco Foundation Literary Awards.

Zekarias Musele Thompson is an artist concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures — and how we bring them into material form. Utilizing sonic composition, mark-making, performance, photography, collaborative group practice, and writing, their practice creates containers that support our ability to navigate emergent psychosomatic responses through deep listening and close attention. Zekarias lives and works in Oakland and Reykjavik and received their MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2025. They have presented solo exhibitions and projects at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Gray Area, as well as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and The Lab.

More performers to be announced.