Ife Franklin’s most prominent art of the past decade has delved into the legacy of African-Americans in colonial America by building “Ancestor Slave Cabins/Praise Houses,” organizing ring shout dances, and leading “Ancestor Processions” to the burial sites around Boston of colonial-era free and enslaved African-Americans.
Her exhibition “The Resurrection of Ifé Franklin”—on view at Bentley University’s RSM Art Gallery in Waltham from Jan. 15 to March 2, 2025 (the closing has been extended by a day)—is a one-room, two-decade survey of quieter works: sculptures, cosmic Afrofuturist drawings, an “Ogun Mask,” a “Moonshine Jug,” a “JuJu Jacket for my Grandfather.”
The title piece “The Resurrection of Ife Franklin,” from 2007, is a vertical package of cloth tightly bound with string. “It’s about leaving behind the old, wrapping that up so that energy stays there, covering it with different amulets and crystals, ropes. Wrapping it up so the spirit stays there. Because it needs to stay there so I can go to another dimension,” Franklin says. “Inside the white fabric are some of my dreadlocks, my locks are in there. Your hair is such a battery source, a power source. It’s also reminiscent of when enslaved people would cut off parts of themselves and give it to their children so they could be remembered.”
The piece is a form of “hoodoo,” she says, which “is really the synchronization of traditional African religion with Christianity.”
“Old wives tales, all of these things actually work. Most people know this,” Franklin says. “…These are jewels that my African ancestors instilled in us and we were able to save and savor. This is energy instilled in my work.”
The 64-year-old Roxbury artist says the exhibition title “is about my rebirth myself as a full-time artist” since she was “terminated” from her job of 10 years leading art projects with youth at a domestic violence nonprofit. “My friends have referred to it as my liberation.”
Franklin says, “We are always shedding old skin, if we’re in alignment, because some people don’t. It’s not an easy thing to keep transforming, to keep shapeshifting.”
The newest artworks in the exhibition are her “Conjure Bottles,” which she began making during Covid.
“Conjure is a part of my life and I have seen theses vessels before,” Franklin says. “Bottles that people leave at the graveyard, bottles that people infuse with their magic, with their juju. I’m definitely of the spiritual belief that you can infuse objects with your power. I really love the bottles because they’re really beautiful and really reflective and they’re powerful. They’re infused with medicine. I pray over the bottles. I sage the bottles. I burn sage and clean the bottles and wash them to clean out old energy. Then I sage them to make sure they’re totally cleaned out and imbued with positive spiritual energy.”
Inspirations range from Haitian voodoo ceremonies to South Carolina bottle trees.
Franklin says, “They can be used in ceremony. They can be presented to a deity. You can leave them at a gravestone for somebody. They’re vessels to connect with the spirit world. … These are new sacred objects.”
Her artworks, Franklin says, are “meant as education. They’re meant as healing. They’re meant as beauty. They’re meant as spirituality. They’re meant for transformation.”
“I am a living, breathing manifestation of the joy of my ancestors and joy is what kept them alive,” Franklin says. “We know that’s good juju, that’s good energy.”
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