Date and Time
- Thursday, Feb 12, 2026 6pm - 7:30pm
Location
Museum of the African Diaspora
685 Mission St
Details
MoAD presents O-O-H Child, a performance rooted in M. Carmen Lane’s installation You Weren’t Ready for Mami Wata in the Bates Gallery, commissioned as a conceptual and spiritual fulcrum in UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe. Named after an idiom that holds recognition, warning, tenderness, and release in a single breath, O-O-H Child begins where language thins and embodied knowing takes over, unfolding through sound and movement.
Shaped by Lane’s interdisciplinary practice, which weaves together ancestral knowledge and cosmological imagination, the work approaches unbinding as an active relationship to inheritance. It draws on inherited capacities including agility, malleability, boldness, creativity, and strength, situating Black life within deep time and relational possibility. These inheritances are mobilized not to discard lineage, but to defy categorization and constraint through experimentation, play, and refusal.
Lane is joined by Sidra Leigh Bell and Sophia Halimah Parker in an embodied inquiry into what becomes possible when inherited capacities are activated as tools for self-determination and unencumbered being, with costuming by Mark Eric extending the exploration across body, memory, and form.
The evening concludes with a conversation moderated by Key Jo Lee, offering space for reflection on lineage, concept, process, and emergence.
Please note: the performance space is intimate, and seating will be on a first come, first served basis.
