Helina Metaferia, New(o)man, 2018, archival inkjet print. Courtesy of Barnett Newman Foundation, Artist Rights Society NY and National Gallery of Art
Against a Sharp White Background
gallery 360, northeastern university, january 29 - april 5 (extended through summer and online due to coronavirus)
The title of Helina Metaferia’s first solo exhibition in Boston pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, folklorist, and author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In a 1928 essay, Hurston reflects on her racialized lived experience:
I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
Metaferia layers the original Hurston reference onto the monochrome walls of the modernist “white cube” gallery. Canonical works of twentieth-century American and European art (predominantly by white men) were — and largely continue to be — given visual and spatial primacy in major arts institutions, rendering women of color distinctly “out of place.”
By way of response, and in chorus with artists and activists such as Glenn Ligon, Shirley Chisholm, and Solange Knowles, Metaferia brings her own seat to the table: in this case, a folding chair and performative intervention into Joseph Kosuth’s foundational conceptual art installation, One and Three Chairs (1965). Throughout her performance work, Metaferia choreographs her own body’s mark-making in relation to the “sharp, white backgrounds” of famous characters in western art history’s exclusionary narrative: Mark Rothko, Sol Le Witt, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock.
Helina Metaferia talks about her exhibition at Gallery 360. Video by Brandon Farrell.
In her collages, Metaferia addresses the broader social, economic, and political structures in and through which art is displayed, circulated, and consumed. She combines photographic stills from her performances with found materials from auction catalogues, scholarly books, and art magazines (drawn mostly from her birth decade of the ‘80s) which function as the “legitimating ephemera” of the art world. Refiguring these materials in her own image, Metaferia reclaims space in art history for under-recognized and marginalized women and artists of color.
Publication: Catalogue with text by Amy Halliday and Sarah Stefana Smith
Programs:
Reception and artist’s introduction, January 30, 2020
‘Disrupting the Canon’ campus convening with faculty and staff, February 21, 2020
‘By Way of Revolution’ workshops, March 20, 2020 (rescheduled due to C-19)
Artist’s Talk, April 4, 2020 (rescheduled due to C-19)
Press and Public Relations
Northeastern University’s Gallery 360 welcomes Helina Metaferia’s Against a Sharp White Background, CAMD website, January 23, 2020
Mcquaid, Kate, What’s happening in the local arts world (Critics’ Picks), Boston Globe, February 9, 2020
Colby, Celina, Helina Metaferia harpoons white-driven art world in solo show, Baystate Banner, March 11, 2020
