Helina Metaferia: Generations

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.

This exhibition is part of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University’s 2021 Traveling Fellow exhibition program, presented in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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