Dr. Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde was awarded an IAS Collaborative Research Award for he project Sister Song: The Requiem which will support her ongoing collaboration with Indianapolis-based artist LaShawnda Crowe Storm. The Requiem is the second installation of the Sister Song series, a set of community co-created exhibitions that first appeared in the multi-media/performance exhibition Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams (2017-2018). The series is grounded in West African ritual, storytelling, self-naming, and healing, specifically that of the Yoruba; however, each woman’s contribution is based on her own cultural perspectives.
The Sister Song series invites women to “make” wombs that represent the healing of individual, familial, and community wounds caused by racial and sexual violence, particularly to the bodies and in the lives of Black women and girls from Africa and its diaspora. Through Sister Song women reclaim or refuse narratives that shape their lives, therefore making their individual and collective work a transformative process through which they tell, interpret, intersect, and make meaning of experiences that harmed them and practices that heal(ed) them.
A short video of the first installation is HERE.
The College of Arts