'It’s Just a Shot Away' Examines Power, Gender, and Violence at the Floating Museum

Group exhibition brings together artists confronting war, sexual violence, institutional power, erasure, and the human consequences of violence

ALAMEDA, CA, UNITED STATES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Floating Museum presents "It’s Just a Shot Away: Power, Gender, and Violence", a group exhibition opening October 24, 2026, and on view through January 16, 2027. Bringing together artists across generations and media, the exhibition examines violence as an expression of power, from its most immediate forms, including rape, murder, and war, to the systemic violence of exclusion, censorship, erasure, and the denial of autonomy.

“Artists have long used their work to confront things society would rather not look at,” said Marta Thoma Hall, curator of the exhibition and owner of the Floating Museum. “The works in 'It’s Just a Shot Away' ask us to look directly at violence, who holds power and whose experiences are too often ignored or erased.”

The exhibition takes its title from the Rolling Stones’ 1969 song “Gimme Shelter,” recorded amid war, political upheaval, and widespread protest. Merry Clayton’s unforgettable refrain connects sexual violence, murder, and war in a warning that, more than half a century later, continues to resonate.

Ultimately, "It’s Just a Shot Away" asks what artists can do in the presence of violence: expose it, document it, resist it, mourn its victims, and create forms through which trauma can be acknowledged and shared. When language and institutions fail, art can insist upon attention and make visible what systems of power might prefer to remain unseen.

ARTISTS AND WORKS ON VIEW
At the center of the exhibition is pioneering feminist artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose work has investigated gender, identity, surveillance, and systems of control for more than five decades. Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, Hershman Leeson challenged the double standards confronting women in both the art world and society, frequently using photography and her own image to transform the female body from an object of representation into a site of agency and resistance. Her landmark film "!Women Art Revolution (!W.A.R.)", later documented the feminist art movement and women artists' struggle for recognition and equality.

That history of power and resistance reverberates throughout "It’s Just a Shot Away". Lucy Puls addresses sexual exploitation and the intersection of wealth, privilege, and impunity. Using appropriated imagery presented on silver platters, Puls turns the visual language of luxury and service toward questions of consumption, objectification, and the abuse of girls and young women. Her recent work confronting Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful social network surrounding him uses the platter simultaneously as object and metaphor, a disturbing image of bodies offered for the gratification of the powerful.

The exhibition expands from violence enacted upon the individual body to the destruction of communities through conflict and war. Chester Arnold, Al Farrow, Ehren Tool, Enrique Chagoya, and Bradley McCallum approach war, political violence, destruction, and their aftermath from markedly different perspectives. Arnold depicts Gaza as a landscape of rubble and devastation against the unsettling beauty of its Mediterranean coastline, confronting viewers with the human cost of war.

For Ehren Tool, a veteran of the Gulf War, art making is inseparable from the experience of trauma. His handmade ceramic cups incorporate imagery associated with military service and conflict and are given away rather than sold. For "It’s Just a Shot Away", Tool will create a “squad” of thirteen cups that will be given to visitors at the conclusion of the exhibition, transforming objects rooted in war into gestures of exchange, empathy, and remembrance.

Artists Featured:
Chester Arnold, Airco Caravan, Enrique Chagoya, Al Farrow, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mildred Howard, Kristina Kotlier, Lyn Liu, Bradley McCallum, Nadège Monchera-Baer, Wangechi Mutu, Alaïa Parhizi, Ginny Parsons, Michele Pred, Lucy Puls, Erin Riley, Marnika Shelton, M. Louise Stanley, Ehren Tool, Kara Walker, Cheyann Washington.

ABOUT THE FLOATING MUSEUM
The Floating Museum is a unique gallery housed on a barge on the Oakland Estuary at 2517 Blanding Ave and supported by the Hall Art and Technology Foundation. Curated by artist and philanthropist Marta Thoma Hall, the museum showcases work by underrepresented artists, bringing together international creators and emerging talent while expanding access to art and providing a platform for artists historically overlooked by traditional institutions. Learn more about the museum about past exhibitions at https://www.hallartandtechnologyfoundation.com/floating-museum.

Emma Grenier Selvig
Singer Associates
+1 415-419-7506
emma@singersf.com