Helina Metaferia: Generations
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. November 6, 2021 – April 11, 2022
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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. November 6, 2021 – April 11, 2022
Selected press:
Artsy, Helina Metaferia Honors the Activist Legacies of Black Women across Collage and Performance
Surface, A Regal Headdress Comes Alive With Relics of BIPOC Activism
Interior Design, Artist Helina Metaferia Celebrates Black Women Activists in Two Solo Shows
Boston Globe, In Helina Metaferia’s show at the MFA, an ‘army of women’ wear history on their heads
The family and community that precede us shape how we see the world today. From pride in identity to the effects of suffering across generations and the desire to imagine better futures, how do we process the memories and experiences we inherit?
Centering women of color as protagonists, “Helina Metaferia: Generations” uses collage, video, and installation to explore how inherited trauma informs present-day experiences. Metaferia mines oral histories and institutional archives of Black liberation ephemera to point toward ways in which activists—especially women of color—can profoundly influence the future, and always have. She respectfully involves these communities as collaborators in her art-making practice, asking them to share their “everyday revolutions”—the ways they navigate and negotiate a world that tries to put barriers in their way. Their responses manifest in different media, including collage and video, that explore how we carry on the legacies of our elders, the kinship we find in our contemporaries, and the many ways these relationships inform and shape our worlds.
Artsy, Helina Metaferia Honors the Activist Legacies of Black Women across Collage and Performance
Surface, A Regal Headdress Comes Alive With Relics of BIPOC Activism
Interior Design, Artist Helina Metaferia Celebrates Black Women Activists in Two Solo Shows
Boston Globe, In Helina Metaferia’s show at the MFA, an ‘army of women’ wear history on their heads
The family and community that precede us shape how we see the world today. From pride in identity to the effects of suffering across generations and the desire to imagine better futures, how do we process the memories and experiences we inherit?
Centering women of color as protagonists, “Helina Metaferia: Generations” uses collage, video, and installation to explore how inherited trauma informs present-day experiences. Metaferia mines oral histories and institutional archives of Black liberation ephemera to point toward ways in which activists—especially women of color—can profoundly influence the future, and always have. She respectfully involves these communities as collaborators in her art-making practice, asking them to share their “everyday revolutions”—the ways they navigate and negotiate a world that tries to put barriers in their way. Their responses manifest in different media, including collage and video, that explore how we carry on the legacies of our elders, the kinship we find in our contemporaries, and the many ways these relationships inform and shape our worlds.