This exhibition examines how Marianetta Porter uses everyday objects, fragments, and embodied memory to make absence an active, living presence while challenging linear histories. Rooted in African American experience, her practice treats what is discarded, overlooked, or missing not as loss, but as a source of meaning that continues to act on the present. Through her process and materials, Porter reveals how memory is carried in the body and embedded in ordinary things. Her work also resists forward-moving notions of time, instead presenting a diasporic temporality in which past, present, and lived experience circulate together through repetition, touch, and recall. In doing so, Porter proposes a vision of history as unfinished, memory as active, and absence. Curated by Juana Williams.

Marianetta Porter is a visual artist and product designer whose research and creative practice are grounded in the study of African American history, culture, and representation. Through the language of visual art, she draws connections between historic memory and contemporary African American life, giving voice to the history of the African diaspora while acknowledging its central influence on the birth and flourishing of American culture.

Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the Spoleto Festival, the Harriet Tubman Museum, and the Hampton University Museum of Art.

She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hampton University and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. The recipient of numerous awards, Porter is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art and Design.

Juana Williams is a curator and writer whose work explores the intersections of cross-border intellectual history, cultural memory, and identity formation as expressed through modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas.

Williams has held curatorial and academic appointments at organizations including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Library Street Collective, Wayne State University, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Her curatorial projects have been presented at institutions across the United States and France, including the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. In addition, she has presented lectures at various museums and universities and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs. Her work has been written about in publications such as Artsy, Beaux Arts Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, Michigan Chronicle, and Observer. Williams holds a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Art History from Wayne State University.