Crowning Care II
- Mixed Media
- 39 x 30.5 in
- Metaferia Helina
This collage is from Helina’s By Way of Care series, which was a year-long commissioned project by the curatorial team Designing Motherhood, where she worked with doulas and birth workers of the Maternity Care Coalition in Philadelphia through a performance workshop designed to care for those that give care. Two of the birth workers who participated in the workshop were photographed for her collages, which crowned them with archives from the organization's 40-year history of providing support to pregnant women and young children. This project is a sequel to her current project, By Way of Revolution, which focuses on undertold activist legacies of women in social justice movements. Both projects look at the politics of care and the often-invisible labor of BIPOC women’s contributions to society.
I wanted a piece to specifically honor Black women in the U.S. While they are Philadelphia based, the messaging is national. Black women are the foundation of this nation and have experienced unbearable consequences for state building and U.S. identity formation. Their resilience as humans, mothers and caregivers is celebrated in these pieces. Additionally, as a marginalized segment of U.S. population, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women (CDC).
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Through a hybrid of media, Helina's practice is concerned with exploring overlooked stories relating to the Black experience, mainly in the context of the West. She approaches this by centering Black bodies, mostly women, in positions of power and vulnerability to interrogate complex histories of systemic oppression, questioning how it informs personal experiences and interpersonal relationships. She is also influenced by her Ethiopian heritage, often drawing upon traditional African art sensibilities in her work, specifically the intersection of visual art and ritual.
As a research-based artist, Helina's work is informed by written and oral archives, dialogical art, and somatic practices. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow / Assistant Professor at Brown University. Helina's work has appeared in numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions including Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit; Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, among many others. Her solo exhibition, Generations opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Autumn 2021. Helina's work has also been supported by several artist residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis, MASS MoCA, and Triangle Arts Association. She is also a participant of the 2021 Drawing Center's Viewing Program. Helina received her MFA from Tufts University's School of the Museum of Fine Art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.