Exhibition

MA Curatorial Practice and CP Projects Space present “so I told him, ‘come here and live with your grandma,’—otherwise known as Migratory Patterns,” curated by MA Curatorial Practice student Kyle Colón.

Humans have always exhibited the tendency to migrate, be it through culturally nomadic lifestyles or as a result of imperialistic violence such as war, climate crises or ideological persecution. If these spaces that enclose us are only temporary, how does the home persist? Through the things we carry with us? Or heirlooms and possessions. Our tokens of sentimentality? Is home culture and tradition? Perhaps home can be the memories we hold closely with intent to pass down to our children; a foundation for the homes they’ll need to build. Here we see the deconstruction of the home. Nivia Hernandez both blends the photographic image into furniture and sculpts from household cleaning products. Cristina Loukopoulos creates collage-like paintings rendering small tokens of sentimentality with herself, while Ruby Perkins explores how the ancestral home may follow us. And to look into Madjeen Isaac’s painting is to look out to the community as the heart of the home.

The title is a quote from The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 novella written by Langston Hughes, accompanied by photographs of Roy DeCarava. The story describes life during the Harlem Renaissance, a direct result of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to metropolitan areas of the midwest and northeast United States.

The home is not bound to any structure. The home is not solitary in time nor space—it is transient. The home is a thing kept close. When it is our time to move, the home will migrate with us as we’re inseparable.