SOA Village Housing DBA Support Oakland Artists

Society's Cage is a powerful social justice fine art installation conceived by Dayton Schroeter and Maxim Fields as a monument to social justice in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The piece is a bold interpretive installation that challenges viewers to reckon with America's long history of racial injustice and white supremacy. The installation features a raised pavilion with a 15-foot cube crafted from weathered iron rods consisting of nearly 500 suspended weathered steel rods. Each facade of the cube embodies a graphic representation of a data graph that correlates to the primary institutional forces of state violence — mass incarceration, civilian killings by police, capital punishment, and lynching.

Support Oakland Artists is bringing Society’s Cage to Oakland, CA, which has been shown on the mall in DC, in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, and the War Memorial Plaza in Baltimore, Maryland. For the one-month Oakland activation, the piece will be sited prominently in the Frank Ogawa Plaza, with City Hall as the backdrop.

Oakland is a perfect host for Society’s Cage, as the home of the Black Panther Party, which was founded to combat the legacy of police oppression, inequitable incarceration practices, and remnants of slavery in the form of state-sponsored terrorism against Black people. Frank Ogawa Plaza is significant in that it has been re-named by the community, Oscar Grant Plaza, for the 22-year-old unarmed transit rider that was shot and killed by the transit police, which set off a national anti-police terror movement.

We look forward to hosting the installation and curating a series of programmatic offerings that feature the breadth of cultural arts, academic, and social justice organizations and institutions in the Oakland Bay Area region.