Encounters and Connections at MFA Boston

Encounters and Connections at MFA Boston

Stephen Hamilton — Joseph Lewis as Eze Nri — 2018

From July 3, 2021 through February 6, 2022, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presents “New Light: Encounters and Connections,” an exhibition in which a contemporary work is juxtaposed with one or two objects rarely exhibited in the Museum’s history.

Source: Museum of Arts, Boston. Image: Stephen Hamilton: “Joseph Lewis as Eze Nri”, 2018 Image © Stephen Hamilton, courtesy MFA Boston.

According to the Museum, the contemporary works in the exhibition were acquired last year as part of the Museum’s initiative to support emerging artists in Boston and the rest of the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

One such work is “Joseph Lewis as Eze Nri” (2018) by Stephen Hamilton (b. 1988), shown in the exhibition alongside a woman’s elejo wrapper cloth created in Nigeria during the first half of the 20th century, and a quilt created in 1975 by artist Annie Mae Young (1928–2013) in Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

Another bold juxtaposition is that of Lavaughan Jenkins’ “I Want to Learn You” (2019) with “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Cardinal Alonso Borja”, a 15th-century altarpiece by the Valencian artist Gonçal Peris, allowing viewers to appreciate the compositional parallels between the two works, yet so far apart in time.

The temporal difference is even greater in “Triangle Pairs with Pharaoh Heads and Nefertiti Recesses” (2018), a work by artist LaKela Brown (b. 1982) that is displayed alongside a carved Egyptian fragment (probably depicting Princess Merytaten, the eldest daughter of Queen Nefertiti) from the New Empire (1349–1336 BC), a work that has never before been exhibited at the Boston MFA. The museum notes the affinities between the two works, both in their surface texture and in their message of pride in beauty and kinship.