Collaging With...Helina Metaferia

Meet Helina Metaferia, whose work is featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage and will be leading a collage workshop at the Phillips on August 18. 

Helina Metaferia (b. Washington, DC; active in New York, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her art merges archives, somatic studies, and dialogue to highlight overlooked narratives, especially those of BIPOC and femme individuals. Her projects critique biases in art history, recognize the contributions of BIPOC women activists, and redefine citizenship in the context of forced migration. In today’s challenging political climate, where Black lives fight for recognition and women confront sexual violence, her work seeks to address the complexities of American identity.

Tell us about your artistic process.

My process is very research-based and tied to community-based practices. There is an emphasis on process over object in my work, though I enjoy using my hands and the tactility of making visual forms. My work utilizes Ethiopian iconography, history, and generational storytelling as a method to empower everyday people, so they may realize they have agency in this world. It is a deeply collaborative process with the individual subjects in my work. 

What are some of your general practice techniques or beliefs that you incorporate into your lessons?

I am a big fan of the idea of play, or experimentation, as a way to loosen yourself up in the studio, and beyond. Children are the most free and playful when creating. And so to some extent, as artists, we need to regress our attitude, while maturing the technical and conceptual skills we’ve acquired over the years to produce our work. That is what I strive for in my work. 

Could you talk about your work that is on view in Multiplicity? 

Headdress 61 was part of a recently commissioned project for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial, in collaboration with Fisk University, Vanderbilt University, and Frist Art Museum. I conducted my signature “By Way of Revolution” social practice workshop with Fisk University students [The workshop investigates how histories of protest inform our present-day moment, and the powerful yet often overlooked role that BIPOC women (both cis and trans) play in them.], and later worked with them to find civil rights sit-in protest archives at the Nashville Public Library and Fisk University Library. The resulting project is a combination of that specific workshop and local research for a life-size collage for Multiplicity, which premiered at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. The subject of the collage is Chase Williamson, who was a curatorial fellow at the Frist Art Museum for the Multiplicity show and helped organize the workshop. There is a complete bibliography for the archives used in the collage, which is available on the museum wall label at The Phillips Collection. 

What are you teaching/leading during your collage workshop at the Phillips?

I am providing an experience on how community gathering can be a form of collaging. This is a more conceptual and social practice approach. If collaging simply means putting disparate materials together, it can be much more expansive than simply paper or two-dimensional forms. What happens when we collage our worlds and build new worlds and stories together? The event will be partly an artist talk on alternative methodologies to collage, and partly hands-on, experimental practices. Beware: there will be no scissors or glue involved. For those who want a more traditional approach to collage, I have a 20-minute tutorial on MoMA’s YouTube page. But this in-person workshop is designed to help you reconsider your ideas of the art form altogether.