Jackie Milad

Centre Street Building, Level 2

Abracadabra (Abuelita’s Bowl) and Ya Habibti, Ta’ala (2025) by Jackie Milad are the first ever contemporary interventions in the Walters’ Ancient Egyptian galleries. Milad has created two large-scale mixed-media collages that are on view alongside the row of royal heads in the Egyptian Royal Power gallery. Those looking closely at the collage will see drawings of objects in the room, such as King Amasis, King Amenhotep II, and a seated cat, next to actual ancient sculptures of the Egyptian rulers in the museum’s collection. By collaging pops of neon paint, sketches printed on chiffon, and clippings of her past works, the Egyptian- and Honduran-American artist explores her identity and creates the cross-cultural connections she wishes to see between her heritage and historic objects on display in museums.

Artist’s Statement
“My artistic practice is motivated by a need to record and tell my own story, and in doing so, assert stories like mine into the collective history. As a child in a multicultural immigrant family, I’ve struggled to connect the history of my Egyptian and Honduran ancestry to my life as an American. My process in the studio models on a personal scale the recording and sharing of my history. I mine Western museums for their ancient Egyptian and Indigenous Central American collections to find my dispersed heritage and reclaim objects by creating a personal visual database and re-appropriating select antiquities into my work. I use my own drawings of these antiquities and excavate my earlier artworks, splicing them into new pieces. Every layer in my works is material evidence of my decisions and labor, and an account of my presence in the world today. The surfaces of my pieces are intentionally chaotic with an accumulation of tactile fragments and layers of paint. My large abstract works on hand-dyed canvas and paper are packed with symbols pulled from diverse sources. The layered compositions mimic my mixed-cultural upbringing by blending what appears to be disparate imagery, icons, and language. My palette is reminiscent of colors I associate with my grandparents’ home in Honduras, political graffiti in Cairo, and Western pop culture.

In general, audiences expect publicly displayed artwork to be defined and explained. By obfuscating the meaning, I prevent a single reading of the artwork and embrace the complexity of the artwork and its analogy to the process of history-making.