In 2022, Atlanta- and San Juan–based artist Kelly Taylor Mitchell (b. 1994) traveled to Brazil’s Bahia region, home to one of the largest populations of maroons or quilombolas, descendants of formerly enslaved people who self-emancipated. There, she attended the annual festival of Iemanjá (Yemayá), which celebrates the Candomblé orixá, or goddess of the sea. She witnessed this and other ever-evolving spiritual traditions, in which elements of West African Yoruban rites and European Catholicism have fused. Mitchell also encountered religious artworks and participated in processions and offerings.

In this exhibition, Mitchell’s works converse with the powerful, ocean-oriented objects and ritual performances she saw in Bahia. An ongoing project of diasporic mapping across the American South and the Caribbean, the artworks are sites of reunion between the artist, her own forebears, non-biological kin, and greater divinities. Though their true activation only occurs in private, on view here, they help us imagine performing similar communions of our own.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA) and is part of the SMFA’s ongoing Traveling Fellows program, presented in collaboration with the MFA.