murmurations and other spiritual entanglements

bashexo

Jewett Art Gallery

March 14 - April 3, 2026

hanging doll-like sculpture made of purple/green fabric with printed coral-like pattern and red button eyes

murmurations and other spiritual entanglements is a site-specific installation by bashexo. Iterated and explored for over a decade, this work takes multiple forms in different places and at different times, appearing as installations, performance art, experimental video and sound, and photography.

The project encounters and adapts Yorùbá Egúngún ancestral reverence practices and honors the collective embodiment of ancestral energies. The installation at Wellesley College is a visual articulation of tending to the spirits of stolen/missing Black femmes (trans and cisgender) of the African diaspora. bashexo assembles spiritual and cultural textiles, artifacts, and ordinary objects in order to conjure liminal spaces, and to tell stories about ancestral commingling and belonging to the diaspora, West Africa, and the divinities.

horned figure made of patterned fabric, standing under a patterned fabric umbrella, with doll-like figures made of patterned fabric with button eyes hanging around it; black fabric hangs in the background

This exhibition will be on view in the Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College from March 14 - April 3, 2026. The Gallery, located on the main floor of the Jewett Arts Center, is open to the public Thursday - Sunday, 12:00 - 5:00 pm, or by appointment with the gallery director. A closing reception to celebrate the show and the artist will be held on Friday April 3 from 4:30 - 6:30 pm.

The Gallery is free to visit. Visitors driving to campus should park in the Davis Parking Facility near the Central St. entrance to campus and walk to Jewett from there. See a campus map here.

To arrange a guided tour of the exhibition, make an appointment to see the show outside of regular public hours, receive guidance about accessible parking/walking routes to the Gallery, or for more information, contact gallery director Samara Pearlstein at spearls2@wellesley.edu or 781-283-2043.

striped and patterned fabric figure with red button eyes hanging in front of many other figures

several hanging figures, each made of a different patterned fabric, in front of a brown wall with several photographs on it

patterened fabric figure hanging in the air in front of a larger standing figure with horns, made of a different patterned fabric and under a patterned umbrella

person wearing a black fullbody spandex outfit covering their face, lying under a pile of figures made of intensely patterned fabric

bashexo

bashexo is a Providence, Rhode Island-based trans non-binary transdisciplinary creative whose socially engaged creative practice blends race and queer theory with African diasporic spiritual traditions and aesthetics to engage in care conjuring, inspired by the poetics of Blackness and Black queer aliveness. Ze co-founded the unbound bodies collective (ubb), an experimental transdisciplinary creative space/place/making & tending collective of and for QTBIPOC creatives (art activists, tricksters in-training, healers) in Boston and Rhode Island. The collective was founded to address the absence and erasure of artist-led experimental QTBIPOC creative spaces in Boston, and offers a path to cultivate and nourish QTBIPOC creative community that refuses material and embodied violence.

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