Series Title:

"Refiguring the Canon"

Recent exhibitions of the work include:

2022-2028 Group Exhibitions as part of a traveling show with Independent Curators International @ The Africa Center, New York, NY (2002); UMBC Art Gallery (2023); Des Moines Art Center (2024): McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College (2024); Knoxville Museum of Art (2025)

2020 Solo Exhibition @ Northeastern University's Gallery 360, Boston, MA

2020 Solo Exhibition @ Auburn University's Biggins Gallery, Auburn, AL

2019 Two Person Exhibition @ NOMAD Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

2018 Solo Exhibition @ Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC

Description:

In “Refiguring the Canon,” I create a hybrid environment where performance art and collage are used to interrogate racism, sexism, and notions of western exceptionalism within art historical narratives and institutional spaces. I display documentation from performances at the National Gallery of Art and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in which I assert my body using simple gestures in contrast to historic artworks, challenging their conceptual meaning. In other works, I use found magazines, including Art News, Art Forum, and Art in America, published in the 1980’s (the decade of my birth). Combining the images of artwork featured in the magazine with photographic stills from my recent performances, I create an avatar persona who reclaims a space in art history for under-recognized and marginalized women and artists of color. Playing with the 1980’s trending re-interest in “primitivism,” I use my Ethiopian-American female body as a way to reclaim that gaze and decolonize the appropriation of black culture.