NEWARK — Helina Metaferia’s deep engagement with pan-African and African-American aesthetics, in addition to the visible language of protest, reverberates all through her solo exhibition When Civilizations Heal. The fruits of the Ethiopian-American artist’s two-year residency at New Jersey non-profit Challenge for Empty House, and considered one of her largest exhibits thus far, it includes sculpture, efficiency, video, and the photocollages for which she is maybe finest identified.
“Crown (Nigist)” (2025) calls for the viewer’s consideration instantly upon getting into. Its towering layers of forged and etched brass are harking back to 18th- and Nineteenth-century coronets of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, however the streamlined design, topped with a circlet of feminine gender symbols, gestures extra to the modern. The etched medallions comprising the middle of the crown’s band bear photographic fragments of protesting crowds, their faces easing out and in of legibility as in early daguerreotypes. An analogous crown seems in movies taking part in on a row of 5 displays close by, which alternate between nonetheless photographs and excerpts from numerous iterations of Metaferia’s efficiency, “The Willing” (2022–25). In a sequence filmed on the Museum of Toledo, gloved museum staff take away the crown’s plexiglass shell; the artist then picks up the artifact along with her naked fingers and locations it on her head. It’s an arresting and shifting second that shocked me out of ingrained museum etiquette whereas fulfilling, by proxy, the fantasy of touching a priceless piece of historical past.
Helina Metaferia, “Crown (Nigist)” (2025), brass sculpture with etching
The artist then strikes by the museum galleries, pausing to put herself amongst assortment objects from the Greco-Roman world and Historical Egypt, a reminder of Ethiopia’s place alongside these highly effective historic empires. I learn it as an extension of Lorraine O’Grady’s “Miscegenated Family Album” (1994), during which she claims lineage to Historical Egyptian royalty to encourage a capacious method to diasporic identification that transcends a White colonial lens. The efficiency ends with Metaferia inviting spectators to bounce along with her, inserting the crown on their heads, and inspiring them to move it on to others in flip. This second of communal pleasure and concurrent disruption of institutional energy constructions types an necessary throughline within the present.
Metaferia’s creation of her personal artifacts in response to collectors and establishments destroying, stealing, and/or entombing such historical past combines successfully along with her use of efficiency objects and reproductions of historic ephemera to spotlight a lineage of Black feminine activism that not often made it into mainstream media. Her time spent in native archives may be seen in reproductions of flyers from the Seventies and ‘80s, which contain announcements for events ranging from a meeting on reproductive rights to the 1976 iteration of Miss Black American New Jersey. The assemblages, entitled “Amulets” appended with the numbers 1–4 (2025), are arranged to evoke the domestic space of a woman’s dressing desk, suggesting that gadgets generally related to a trivial femininity, such because the lipstick and the wonder pageant flyer, are comparable in worth to these with loftier associations, such because the high-quality artwork object.
Whereas Metaferia’s work is doubtlessly scholarly — the present additionally features a library of volumes on activism and Ethiopian arts and tradition — this exhibition is excessive on visible pleasure and low on didacticism. Collectively, her items present a robust argument for the best way smaller gestures, reminiscent of adornment and acts of care, may help to pave the trail to a revolutionary future.
Helina Metaferia, “Amulets 2” (2025), assembled brass sculptures, discovered objects, and paperwork
Element view of Helina Metaferia, “The Willing (Compilation of Series)” (2022–25), 5-channel video set up
Helina Metaferia, “The Meeting: (in)Justice in Nashville” (2025), hand-cut and assembled blended media collage
Helina Metaferia, “Amulets 3” (2025), assembled brass sculptures, discovered objects, and paperwork
Helina Metaferia, “Amulets 1” (2025), assembled brass sculptures, discovered objects, and paperwork
Set up view of Helina Metaferia: When Civilizations Heal (photograph courtesy Challenge for Empty House)
Helina Metaferia: When Civilizations Heal continues at Challenge for Empty House (800 Broad Road, Newark, New Jersey) by August 17. The exhibition was curated by Jasmine Wahi.
