Helina Metaferia

An interdisciplinary artist and assistant professor for Visual Arts at Brown, Helina Metaferia is known not only for performance, video, and sculpture but also for her intricate collage works. Metaferia’s latest endeavor, We’ve Been Here Before, is currently installed on RISD’s campus, on the brick wall directly outside of the RISD Museum’s Pearl Cafe. The work serves as an ode to the living histories of BIPOC women and femmes.

We’ve Been Here Before utilizes both the artist’s own photography and historical protest photographs that she sourced from the libraries and archives at both RISD and Brown. Metaferia, who is Ethiopian-American, has spent much of her artistic career focusing on the often marginalized people in the United States, and We’ve Been Here Before seeks to bring the American gaze away from that of the white male. One facet of Metaferia’s work that is particularly striking is the fact that she chose to photograph portraits of individuals that are local to Providence’s active art community (including Sháńdíín Brown,RISD Museum’s Curator of Native American Art).We’ve Been Here Before speaks not only to students in Providence, but to a diverse audience. The exhibition also includes photographic portraits of Japanese, Navajo, Peruvian, and Jamaican female-presenting people.

Metaferia created a headdress for each portrait by gathering her visual research into collages that reflect the specific histories of its wearer. For example, the subject in Metaferia’s Headdress40 (2022), which is currently on view in the Pearl Cafe, is Jamaican, and wears an intricate and ornate headdress that is composed of black and white photographs of activism and protest within Providence’s Black municipality.Many of these photographs seem to be family pictures while others are from theCivil Rights protests in the60s, taken of or by Brown students during that time.The center of the headdress holds a photograph of students holding a sign that says “Keep Blacks In Brown”, and is situated between images of protestors raising their fists in a symbol of Black pride and solidarity. This particular piece highlights the history of Black students and residents of Providence and the histories that still very much influence the lives of Black students and residents today. The use of collage structures and the unification of every single part of the piece, just as the history and experiences of minorities inAmerica, create unity and empowerment within these communities. The same sentiment is present in every one of Metaferia’s works.

One of the most important things about this exhibition is the way that it’s presented. These collages, printed onto vinyl hangings and a banner, are hung in communal spaces where people gather to have coffee, study, or simply be with one another; they will be looked at by people from all demographics.These are people within our community, pictured alongside their own history and the history of the city that we are viewing this exhibition in, and because of this, Metaferia’s works evoke the sentiment of collaboration and identity on a whole different level. We’ve Been Here Before is on show at the RISD Museum until June25th, 2023.