A 2nd Year MFA Exhibition by Jaleane Tatum

Kresge Gallery 114 | October 13-24

Closing reception: October 24 at 6:30-8:30 pm

A mother is a sacred position, a portal of life and abundance. She is the strength of the bloodline, the warmth that binds a family together. From her mother, to my mother, to me, something ancient is passed hand to hand: a lineage woven from femininity, closeness, and perseverance. 

Step into this exhibition and enter a reimagined childhood seen through the eyes of both matriarchs and their daughters. HER MOTHER’S L.I.N.E.A.G.E. moves through memory as both inheritance and prophecy. 

This work lives within Afrofuturism’s quieter terrain: 

where world-building begins in the home, 

where personal archives become constellation maps, 

where absence reverberates just as loudly as presence. 

HER MOTHER’S L.I.N.E.A.G.E. is an encoded archive: 

Legacy. Inheritance. Narrative. Echoes. Ancestry. Guardians. Everlasting. 

Castings of my body, and the bodies of women from my matrilineal line, immortalize memory and presence. Natural fibers intertwine with found objects salvaged from old homes, carrying traces of what once was. Layered with the voices of my elders and my own, the installation grounds itself in sound, material, and spirit breathing life into what must never be forgotten. This is not only a homecoming into my own memory, my home, and the women who raised me ; it is also a symbolic parallel to the empowerment of African American women as a whole: women who rebuild what has been fragmented, safeguard knowledge, and persist in survival. 

The mother’s lineage lives on. It is something I vow to protect. 

And so, I leave you with a question: what echoes of your own lineage do you carry forward?