No Soy Ana Agnabi - Curator's Tour

Goucher College proudly presents No Soy Ana Agnabi, a solo exhibition by Baltimore-based artist Jackie Milad, featuring new and recent works developed through the support of the Creative Capital Award and the Rubys Artist Grant. This exhibition centers on Milad’s reinterpretation of ancient funerary figures known as shabtis, examining their global dispersal, symbolic resonance, and the ways in which cultural heritage is fragmented and reframed through contemporary practice.

In No Soy Ana Agnabi, Milad expands her signature visual language—layered wall collages, sculptural interventions, and archival imagery—into a series of immersive installations that reclaim the shabti as both object and witness. Drawing from ancient Egyptian funerary practices and working in dialogue with Goucher College’s own collection of shabtis, Milad juxtaposes historical artifacts with hand-crafted surrogates made from bronze, epoxy resin, ceramic, and wood. These figures become agents in a larger narrative about diaspora, colonial extraction, and the emotional toll of cultural displacement.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is a series of altars densely populated with shabti forms, their collective presence evoking both an imagined afterlife and the haunting reality of scattered histories. Monumental collages—some extending up to 11 feet—surround the installation, incorporating fragments of language, textiles, and drawing that evoke a palimpsest of place and identity.

This project marks a major evolution in Milad’s career, reflecting a deepening of her engagement with themes of cultural hybridity, stewardship, and the politics of collecting. Accompanying the exhibition is a bilingual publication (English and Arabic) featuring new essays by leading scholars in Egyptology and cultural history.

No Soy Ana Agnabi  is not merely a meditation on the past—it is a vivid call to reimagine how we carry, question, and reclaim cultural memory in the present.

Host or Publisher Goucher Art Galleries