ARTIST STATEMENT:

I am interested in using art as an excuse to have meaningful conversations about time, space, and belonging. A large part of my creative inquiry is devoted to asserting the black body into sites of systemic oppression — including institutional spaces, art history, gentrified communities, or land marked by historic trauma. Throughout my work, I am constantly reflecting on the notions of "home" and how our racial and gendered body complicates this. Formally, my art exists as an interdisciplinary synthesis of performance, video, installation, assemblage and mixed media collage. I often use my own body in my practice, and sometimes work with the bodies of members of my community through participation and collaboration.

BIO:

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, collage, and assemblage. Her work interrogates the politics of the body in space, particularly as it relates to notions of identity and citizenship. Helina has exhibited her work at venues including Museum of African Diaspora (San Francisco), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Smack Mellon (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit), and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kirtos Desta Center (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). She completed her MFA in 2015 at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her artist residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, MASS MoCA, and Triangle Arts Association, among others. She has taught in the BFA and MFA programs at the San Francisco Art Institute, Michigan State University, and Parsons Fine Arts. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow / Assistant Professor at Brown University and lives and works in New York City.