Join us on Thursday, June 6 at 6.30 pm for an in-person conversation at Center for Book Arts between Helina Metaferia and Kiki Teshome, curatorial assistant at Studio Museum in Harlem.
Protective iconography appropriated from the talisman scrolls adorn each image of the activists, who stand in historical revolutionary gestures. Crowd sourced text from her workshops and participatory installations are placed in sections where prayers are traditionally scribed. Bodily and performative in nature, Been Magic * Been Real is printed to scale of the human form, and can be hung as art, gazed upon, read, recited, or carried as armor in its portable carrying case as a wearable sculpture, much like the traditional scrolls it was modeled after. Like the original scrolls, the book functions as a “visual medicine” with a twist toward contemporary politics and social justice.
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work was included in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. She’s held solo exhibitions at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI; and Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA. Her work is in the permanent collection of institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Kadist in Paris, France; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. Metaferia’s work has been written about in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Artnet News and The Art Newspaper. She received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Visual Art department, and lives and works in New York City.
Kiki Teshome is an arts worker. She is currently a curatorial assistant at Studio Museum in Harlem and was previously the inaugural Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellow at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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