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.

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Please note: the performance space is intimate, and seating will be on a first come, first served basis.

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About the Collaborators:

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M. Carmen Lane is a two-spirit African American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) contemporary artist, writer, and facilitator based in Cleveland, Ohio. Their work explores Black/Indigenous identities, two-spirit and non-binary masculinities, intergenerational grief, and settler colonial behaviors within human systems. Drawing from the personal histories of their Afro-Indigenous family, Lane examines Indigenous displacements, Black fugitive migrations, and the intergenerational traumas of removal—probing how loss, land, and kinship shape identity and belonging.

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Lane is the founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, an artist-led incubator and exhibition space for socially engaged Indigenous artists and artists of color. Their projects and residencies include the FRONT Triennial, EFA Project Space, Everglades National Park, and the Joyce Awards. In 2022, they received the Art Matters Foundation Award. Lane’s solo exhibition í:se (Be Our Guest/Stolen) extends this practice, offering critical reflections on settler colonial frameworks while envisioning liberation, safety, and new forms of home.

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Sidra Leigh Bell is a celebrated choreographer, dancer, performance artist, and the founder and artistic director of Sidra Bell Dance New York, an internationally acclaimed company recognized for its innovative and progressive approach to dance theater. With a career spanning more than two decades, she has created over 100 original works for major institutions including Ailey II, ODC/Dance, The Juilliard School, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Derek Fordjour Studio, and New York City Ballet, where she made history as the first Black woman to choreograph for the company.

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Bell is also a respected educator. She was formerly a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and has held academic appointments at Harvard, University of Oklahoma, and Barnard. Her pedagogical method, Contemporary Systems—an interior & material approach, is internationally recognized and has been featured in Dance Magazine and Dance Teacher Magazine. She is the creative director of MODULE, a New York–based immersive laboratory for movement and theater artists.

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Her collaborations extend into fashion and media, including Interview Magazine, T Magazine, and Cero Magazine. In 2025, she will receive the prestigious Yaddo Artist Medal alongside Langston Hughes and Jill Viney, honoring her fearless exploration of form, identity, and innovation in contemporary performance. www.sidrabell.com, www.sidrabelldanceny.org

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Sophia Halimah Parker is a dancer and dramaturg from Berkeley, California. She has collaborated with and performed works by Sidra Bell Dance New York, Kayla Farrish, and Alexa West, among others. Most recently she collaborated with Bell at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a performer and dramaturg for “G R A P H” during the exhibit “Flight Into Egypt”. She is an MFA Candidate at Columbia University.

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Key Jo Lee (@keyjolee) is chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. In this role, Lee oversees the strategic direction for the museum’s exhibitions and programs; leads globally on identifying and promoting emerging artists from the African diaspora; and works to expand MoAD’s reach and influence locally, nationally, and internationally.

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She is responsible for the overall management and execution of the museum’s curatorial vision, including its exhibitions, publications, and public and educational programs, and plays an important role in the organization’s outreach, communications, and digital strategy. Lee has a master’s degree from and is PhD candidate in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University.

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Her first book, Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, was published by Yale University Press and The Cleveland Museum of Art in January 2023.

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This program is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe on view through August 16, 2026.

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