Freedom Time

This work is abolition in practice

The first part of this newsletter is a BULLETIN BOARD with upcoming and current shows, projects, book releases and events, that I hope you will come to and share with your communities.

And the second part is ROOTS, WEBS, NETS, and BRANCHES. A written offering, sharing of work, expansion & footnotes of what's going on in my studio, practice and brain. This part is paid and I invite you to support my work for $5 a month, $50 a year or become a founding member for $150 a year.

ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS is my practice, is labor, is my work.

1. BULLETIN BOARD

   

Over the past three months, the Dancing Through Prison Walls community have been in residence at Recess Arts in Brooklyn, NY. Making new choreographic works that respond to, reflect and echo dances written by incarcerated folks in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Upstate New York and Michigan, as well as Jenin, Palestine. Embodying freedom through walls, windows, borders, with wings, abolition, an ending to all apartheid states, states rooted in surveillance, caging and imprisonment. Imagining dancing side by side with our comrades, imagining through action, dancing as a form of abolition and resistance. It has been such a deep honor to curate the space we are in at Recess Arts. As the curator of our studio-exhibition-learning space, I have had the pleasure of imagining how to present and share the work DTPW has been doing over the past 10+ years with incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and free-world folks.

A project that has many roles, collaborators, viewers, activations, that are echoed in our multifunctional and interdisciplinary residency. The dance floor installed in the middle of the space, hosts rehearsals and then becomes the stage for our work in progress sharings, the walls hold choreographic notes, words and questions that have influenced the making of these dances. Then comes our abolition library, a living room space with a couch and rug, echoing a home space and the comfortable places we lean on to study in. Our library is a collection of study tools, books, artist books, comics, zines, posters from the DTPW collection. The public is invited to come and read through the offerings, sit on the couch, relax in our space to study, watch a rehearsal and witness the space. A long shelf full of special objects, art, gifts from inside prisons around this globe, fliers, books, rocks, bundles of sage, paintings, artifacts of visits, this is our active altar archive. Both an honoring of those who cannot be here with us and an active sharing of past, present and future paths this work takes us on. Above the altar is an oversized bulletin board (proudly constructed by myself and the Recess install team) that holds the written dances sent from inside prisons in South Dakota, California, Upstate New York, Puerto Rico and Jenin, Palestine. It's important and powerful to have the very work that glues this whole project together (written dances sent from inside prisons) on display in this way. The dances created based on them, embody and bring them to life and yet to glance over and see the choreographers hand writing, makes it come alive in a different way.

Huge shoutout to the DTPW Artistic Director, co-curator, mama, comrade, choreographer, abolitionist, deep visionary force who is to thank for this whole project, Suchi Branfman and other visionary collaborators: Tom Tsai, Amy Oden, Selina Ho, all the writers and dancers, the Recess Team and all our NYC hosts and guides. We are stronger together.

FREEDOM TIME: Undanced Danced through Prison Walls

Recess Arts, Brooklyn, NY

June 28- August 9, 2025

Final sharing and closing reception: Saturday, August 9, 6-9pm, 2025

Join us for the final public event of FREEDOM TIME, sharing choreographies from Auburn State Prison (New York) and Bayamon Correctional Institution (Puerto Rico). Performers include Bernard Brown and Kenji Igus, bringing forth the words and movements of Raúl Reyes Chalas, Gadiel Falcón Rodríguez, Bartholomew, and Ellis. The evening closes with a Freedom Tea Ritual, a conversation, and a collective dance jam.

Recess is proud to host FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, a new Session project by the California-based Dancing Through Prison Walls community. The result of years-long collaboration with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists across the U.S. and beyond, FREEDOM TIME brings forward a living archive of written dances created in confinement—gestures of memory, imagination, resistance, and love that defy the logic of cages.

In 2020, year four of Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ten-year choreographic residency inside a medium security men’s state prison in Southern California, all programming and visitation shut down due to the Covid pandemic. Despite all odds, their dancing collaboration continued, with dances written from bunks under lockdown within lockdown, streaming out through the prison gate. Deeply inspired by the wisdom, knowledge, care, humor and radical thought that was carried forth in those dances, FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is an invitation to push past state and federal boundaries, bearing witness to the deeply interlinked chains of the prison industrial complex, but through imagined, dreamed, written dances. Dancing Through Prison Walls has spent the last eight years dancing in conversation with people caged inside carceral facilities. For Recess’ Session program, they bring these dances into the "free" world as tools for building liberated futures.

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, introduces new dances from incarcerated kin in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Palestine. These contributions expand our understanding of what solidarity can look like: multilingual, transnational, and beautifully entangled. They remind us that the carceral state is global, but so too is our resistance.

The term “Freedom Time” is inspired by Dancing Through Prison Walls collaborator, Richard Martinez, who dubbed his dancing time while incarcerated as a time of freedom, of feeling transported outside the prison walls, as if he would walk out of the prison gym and go home for dinner. It also echoes the Black Panthers’ call and demand for a “freedom time,” a radical, present-tense liberation: not someday, but now.

FREEDOM TIME: undanced dances through prison walls, is a space to dream together, across walls, boundaries, and borders. A space to build a community that defies caging through imagining ways we can move, create, study, and dance together. Regular public events will unfold across the seven-week installation, including: performances, community conversations, dance jams, printmaking workshops, letter-writing gatherings with Dignity Not Detention, and prison abolition trainings with Critical Resistance.

FREEDOM TIME, a publication with Sming Sming Books

Buy it here

Freedom Time is a bold and moving collection of written choreography from inside and through prison walls. It brings together dances created in confinement in California, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and beyond, with voices from formerly incarcerated and “free world” dancers, choreographers, visual artists, and performers. Using movement and storytelling as acts of resistance and survival, Freedom Time is call for a world without cages.

Proceeds from this book go to sustain Dancing Through Prison Walls’ ongoing Freedom Fund, which supports members of our community coming out of prison. Whatever form that may take, the funds are there for our system-impacted brothers, sisters, and siblings to decide what they need and when they need it.

Feeling Language

Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA

May 17- August 9, 2025

Closing event: Saturday, August 9, 1-4 pm, Artist Panel Discussion: 1:30-2:30 pm

Kala Gallery is excited to co-present the exhibition Feeling Language curated by Kate Laster and Julio Rodriguez with NIAD Art Center, featuring new works by over 30 artists, the majority from NIAD Art Center with additional artists from Hospitality House’s Community Arts Program (CAP), a free art studio serving low income and unhoused residents in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, as well as artists from NIAD’s progressive art studio siblings Creative Growth & Creativity Explored.

Feeling Language examines comfort and power in text, writing, reading, sharing and communications. In the words by the curators, “this show is all about comfort text: resilience in everyday words, writing, and reading. Expression can also be wordless, the use of line and color as new vocabulary, pushing a thought out onto a surface, making marks and continuously trying to communicate with the world. We tell stories to sustain ourselves and find each other. These messages embedded in art become an emotional telegram – a signal flare with a flame of memory trailing behind it. Feeling Language encompasses books, lists, slogans, language, gesture, touch and the trust given in sharing.”

Healing: Art and Institutional Care

La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia

August 23- November 9, 2025

Healing: Art and Institutional Care is a group exhibition of contemporary and historic artworks that takes as its starting point the contested space of institutional care.

The exhibition draws from the Larundel Collection, and the unique Art Access Studio program led by artists at the former Larundel Mental Hospital (1953-1991), on what is now the grounds of La Trobe University (Bundoora Campus). Art Access Studio pioneered and challenged the ways in which art could be used therapeutically in psychiatric hospitals, shifting away from the artwork as a diagnostic tool, towards artmaking as an opportunity for self-directed healing.

Alongside select works from the Larundel Collection, exhibited with the permission of the makers, the exhibition includes newly commissioned and existing works by contemporary artists engaging critically with the ethics and limitations of institutional care. This includes works by artists whose practices draw from their lived experiences (of mental ill health, disability justice, neurodivergence and caregiving) to challenge the neutrality of institutional care and redraw its boundaries. In doing so, this exhibition traces how artists create relational possibilities for healing within institutions, in spite of them, and entirely outside them—through both historical precedents and contemporary practices that challenge, refuse and/or reimagine institutional forms of care.

Artists Fayen d’Evie, Carol Dobson, Jenny Hickinbotham, Helen Johnson, Alecia Neo, Sue Roberton, Finnegan Shannon and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, and Grace Wood, Curated by Amelia Wallin and Jacina Leong

Drawing of our collaborative bench above is drawn by Finnegan Shannon. I can’t wait to see the final object!

Don’t Mind if I Do

Gallery 400, Chicago, IL

September 5- December 15, 2025

Don’t mind if I do is a collaborative experiment demonstrating how temporary changes in power structures create pathways of access for visitors, artists, and staff. Anchored by a conveyor belt that brings artworks to visitors who are invited to sit around comfortable furniture and engage with the objects, the exhibition features artworks by several artists who have influenced Shannon’s practice. The paraded objects, including plastic pill bottles, tissue box covers, and gender-affirming packers, signify illness, systems of support, and play within everyday life.

Embraced for its efficiency and mechanized transport of goods, the conveyor belt is re-appropriated as a vehicle for cultivating a more relaxed museum-going experience. It welcomes informality, messiness, and unsettling the hierarchy of objects. Accompanying the exhibition are three solo exhibitions by artists agustine zegers, Sandie Yi, and Finnegan Shannon.

Artists Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Jeff Kasper, Finnegan Shannon, Sandie Yi, agustine zegers, curated by Finnegan Shannon and Lauren Leving

Arm & Arm, a solo show

Eli Marsh Gallery, Amherst College, Amherst, MA

September 15 - October 17, 2025

Opening reception and Talk: September 18, 5-8pm

When a protest banner is held by many in the streets, it becomes a curtain. A curtain for the performance and embodiment of resistance, liberation, protest. When a piece of fabric is unrolled onto a wooden table, it becomes a tablecloth. Next come the dishes, food, and people. A meal is about to be shared. A conversation is about to begin. When many strings are knotted and tied together they become a net, a basket, a holder. Nets for carrying, nets for resting on, nets to trap, and transport. When the claiming of safe spaces becomes essential to survival, chosen communities, neighbors, friends, and lovers come together and become that needed space.

Arm & arm is a space, a stage, a classroom, a porch, a vessel, for holding, for creating safety, and dialogue within. An invitation to work within it, around it, because of it. Becoming and echoing, forms, structures, patterns, and ways that Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, non-binary, two spirit, people of color form kinship, radical community, spaces of survival and dialogues rooted in resistance and liberatory education.

Over the course of the month that the show will be up, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo will invite community members, classes and students, to come craft and shape the space together. A forthcoming schedule of programming to come. Anyone in the Amherst College community can reserve the space to lead workshops, classes, meetings, study groups or gatherings within. A list of programming TBD.