Exhibition Guide

Vibrant energy emanates from tapestries, painting, and sculpture as Jackie Milad interrogates history. This immersive environment swells with remnants of time and collaboration with family. Fragments of previous works find new charge alongside renderings of antiquities printed on chiffon, marks inserted by Milad’s young son, and gleaming charms cast by her goldsmith father. Layer upon layer secretes meaning through personal and material references that connect ancient and contemporary Egypt and symbolically relate Baltimore’s diasporic communities to relatives around the world. In creating her work, Milad choreographs a personal vocabulary for her own Egyptian Honduran American identity.

Milad invites you to consider the intersection of history and myth in dispersed cultural heritage—the systematic plunder by colonial powers of Egyptian material culture, displaced to museum collections in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States. Her personal lexicon of symbols includes shape-shifters that take on new meanings and associations depending on viewing angle and other images nearby. Consider the bronze snake: from a distance it appears enmeshed with other sinuous forms in the tapestry; when viewed view up-close and from the side, it stands alone.

The complexity and depth of Milad’s process reflects her lived experience in a multilingual, multicultural family. Investigations into this confluence of cultural connections within the U.S. often collide with information delivered as fact by Eurocentric institutions. Here, the artist explores how the true expansiveness of self and lineage can find its place in a more accurate and inclusive history.