Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art, an exhibition at Dartmouth College's Hood Museum of Art, featured historical and contemporary artworks made by artists from Africa and the African Diaspora. Organized thematically across three galleries, Homecoming presented artworks from the Hood's collection that demonstrated maternal, familial, and intimate relationships nurtured across time and geographies. Alexandra Thomas, the museum's curatorial research associate, curated the exhibition.1
In a curatorial essay about Homecoming, Thomas credited discourses she encountered in Professor Lisa Lowe's graduate seminar at Yale on “colonial domesticity” on how women's unwaged labor in domestic spaces has reproduced racist and colonial social structures (Thomas 2023). Bringing this terminology to bear on objects in the Hood's collection encouraged viewers to examine the works on display not merely as functional objects with benign meanings, but as creative responses to larger systems of subjugation. By exhibiting objects related to...