2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

I explore how memory is held within our bodies, objects, and physical structures. Sifting through my lived experience as an Ethiopian-American artist, I work to create spaces for tending to our collective memory. The process of remembering is both an act of archiving and survival. To remember is to preserve. I make installations that encourage slow walking, softness, and grounding while also being a poetic space of questioning, grieving, and witnessing. This creates a place where our collective memories–often impacted by colonial and imperial violence–are tended to with care and intention. Using translucent and opaque textiles, clay, and collected organic materials such as fruit skins, seeds, and shells, I draw from my background in collage and printmaking to render compositions that waver between the thresholds of 2D and 3D. I leverage the varying opacities created by layering translucent fabrics to mimic the brief moments of clarity in the otherwise ambiguous endeavor of remembering. I form clay jugs as echoes of the plastic water vessels found in every home in my childhood neighborhood, a constant reminder of the presence of foreign aid organizations and their politics of poverty. These jugs are icons of colonialism, climate injustice, and aid politics. Remaking them with red clay is an effort to reconnect with the soil, to merge the human-made and mass-produced. I create an emptiness where something was once held, depriving them of their purpose. My installations are not altars to perfect memories, but transient spaces in which to reconcile the imperfectness of recalling the past with the present and future.

Yeabsera Tabb (b. 1998) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who then moved to the United States at the age of 13. She is currently based in New York City. She received her BA in Design for Social Impact and Fine Arts from Indiana Wesleyan University (2021) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design at The New School (2025). Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions across Indianapolis including The Tube Factory ArtSpace, Harrison Center, Garfield Park Art Center, 1000 Words Indy, 1920 Gallery and in group shows at New Fields Museum of Art, BUTTER, and One Drop, 25 East Gallery in New York, among others. Her works were reviewed by Sixty Inches From Center, a Chicago based publication. The Indy Reporter did a feature article on her work as well as multiple Harrison Center blog entries (Indianapolis). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Harrison Center and Tube Factory Art space where she worked on her commissioned solo exhibitions and community centered art initiatives. In her work, she explores how memory is held within our bodies, objects, and physical structures. Using translucent and opaque textiles, clay, and collected organic materials such as fruit skins, seeds, and shells, she draws from her background in collage and printmaking to render compositions that waver between the thresholds of 2D and 3D. She leverages the varying opacities created by layering translucent fabrics to mimic the brief moments of clarity in the otherwise ambiguous endeavor of remembering. Her installations encourage slow walking, softness, and grounding while also being a poetic space of questioning, grieving, and witnessing. This creates a place where our collective memories–often impacted by colonial and imperial violence are tended to with care and intention.