Helina Metaferia Takes Back the Museum

NEWARK — Helina Metaferia’s deep engagement with pan-African and African-American aesthetics, as well as the visual language of protest, reverberates throughout her solo exhibition When Civilizations Heal. The culmination of the Ethiopian-American artist’s two-year residency at New Jersey non-profit Project for Empty Space, and one of her largest shows to date, it comprises sculpture, performance, video, and the photocollages for which she is perhaps best known. 

“Crown (Nigist)” (2025) demands the viewer’s attention immediately upon entering. Its towering layers of cast and etched brass are reminiscent of 18th- and 19th-century coronets of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but the streamlined design, topped with a circlet of female gender symbols, gestures more to the contemporary. The etched medallions comprising the center of the crown’s band bear photographic fragments of protesting crowds, their faces easing in and out of legibility as in early daguerreotypes. A similar crown appears in videos playing on a row of five monitors nearby, which alternate between still images and excerpts from various iterations of Metaferia’s performance, “The Willing” (2022–25). In a sequence filmed at the Museum of Toledo, gloved museum workers remove the crown’s plexiglass shell; the artist then picks up the artifact with her bare hands and places it on her head. It is an arresting and moving moment that shocked me out of ingrained museum etiquette while fulfilling, by proxy, the fantasy of touching a priceless piece of history. 

The artist then moves through the museum galleries, pausing to place herself amongst collection objects from the Greco-Roman world and Ancient Egypt, a reminder of Ethiopia’s place alongside these powerful ancient empires. I read it as an extension of Lorraine O’Grady’s “Miscegenated Family Album” (1994), in which she claims lineage to Ancient Egyptian royalty to encourage a capacious approach to diasporic identity that transcends a White colonial lens. The performance ends with Metaferia inviting spectators to dance with her, placing the crown on their heads, and encouraging them to pass it on to others in turn. This moment of communal joy and concurrent disruption of institutional power structures forms an important throughline in the show.

Metaferia’s creation of her own artifacts in response to collectors and institutions destroying, stealing, and/or entombing such history combines effectively with her use of performance objects and reproductions of historical ephemera to highlight a lineage of Black female activism that rarely made it into mainstream media. Her time spent in local archives can be seen in reproductions of flyers from the 1970s 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 table, suggesting that items commonly associated with a trivial femininity, such as the lipstick and the beauty pageant flyer, are comparable in value to those with loftier associations, such as the fine art object.

While Metaferia’s work is doubtlessly scholarly — the show also includes a library of volumes on activism and Ethiopian arts and culture — this exhibition is high on visual pleasure and low on didacticism. Together, her pieces provide a powerful argument for the way smaller gestures, such as adornment and acts of care, can help to pave the path to a revolutionary future.

Helina Metaferia: When Civilizations Heal continues at Project for Empty Space (800 Broad Street, Newark, New Jersey) through August 17. The exhibition was curated by Jasmine Wahi.

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