Black Spaces: Reclaim + Remain
Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain was a special exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) that ran from July 18, 2025, through March 1, 2026. It explored the history of Black displacement, resistance, and the creation of home in West Oakland and Russell City.
LOCATION
Oakland, CA
YEAR
2024 - 2026
SIZE
1700 SF
STATUS
Visit Virtual Exhibition
Context
Approached in 2024 to contribute to this exhibition we thought this was a perfect fit for the studio. Displacement is one of the greatest issues of our time, and particularly common to the African American cultural journey. Because displacement fractures memory, belonging, and identity, our work begins with the opposite proposition: that at the core of all humanity is to seek to find meaning, to create individual expressions of selves as a multiplicity, sensitive to each other and our surroundings in an interconnected pursuit of "awe". This sounds fanciful, but as a studio it is essential for us to hold everyone as a source of light.
Image Credit: Kiki King
Challenge
For more than a decade, blinkLAB has worked throughout East and West Oakland. The city is not simply where we practice—it is our living !LAB. When artist Adrian L. Burrell described the daffodil as a metaphor for the Black experience, the image resonated deeply with our own understanding of place and displacement. Historically excluded from public space and the full rights of citizenship, Black communities have continually created spaces of belonging, only to be displaced and re-established elsewhere. We translated this history into a design framework: the disjointed daffodil petal became both a physical artifact and a cartographic device, tracing patterns of movement, memory, and resilience across the city.
Approach
Overall, the desire was that the installation should read as an environment of reflection and discovery—one that weaves together history, art, architecture, and community research to explore displacement not simply as loss, but as a catalyst for resilience, adaptation, and the continual reimagining of home today.
- •3d modeled the entire exhibition including stage lighting prior to installation.
- •A dark blue purple lighting to underscore a cultural journey of living communities yet unknown.
- •Restrain palette of dark walls and concrete surfaces to allow illumination of the projection videos.
- •Vibrant red mapping graphics are focal points for geographic reference.
Image Credit: Christine Cueto
Image Credit: Kiki King
Image Credit: Kiki King
Credits
News Media
other artists exhibited