The exhibition “Cosmic Threads,” featuring Boston artists Funlola Coker and Maria Molteni and North Berwick, Maine, artist Erin Genia at McCoy Art Gallery at Merrimack College, North Andover, “reimagines humanity’s relationship to the cosmos beyond dominant narratives of technological progress and colonial expansion. Rather than positioning space as a frontier to be conquered, the works presented here approach the universe as a living network of relationships, where all human and non-human matter is deeply interconnected,” according to the school.
Curated by Boston-based artist and Merrimack adjunct lecturer Megan Hyde in collaboration with the artists, the exhibition is on view from Feb. 9 to March 20, 2026.
“The exhibition draws from spiritual traditions rooted in Yoruba, Dakota, and syncretic Catholic lineages, situating cosmic inquiry within ancestral frameworks that understand the universe as relational rather than extractive,” according to the school. “In this context, stars, celestial bodies, and unseen forces are not distant abstractions, but active participants in a shared continuum of life. The works reach into deep time, collapsing distinctions between past, present, and future to propose alternative ways of understanding existence—ways grounded in reciprocity, care, and interdependence.”
Molteni’s brooms seeming to hover in the gallery skylight and seven braided stone rosaries “reference the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades constellation” and their related myths. Molteni’s “Mother Meteor (Cibele)” is “an homage to the Anatolian mother goddess Cibele (or Cybele), known to be a giant black meteorite that fell to earth,” according to the school. “The Madonna di Montevergine, whose sanctuary is built on the site of an ancient temple to Cibele, is one of the famous Black Madonnas of southern Italy. Madonna di Montevergine is known for performing a miracle that saved two gay lovers who had been banished to freeze together on her mountain by the Catholic Church. As the story goes, she sent a beam of light through the clouds to melt the ice an snow sound them. Every year for the annual celebration Candelora, queer Italians pilgrimage up the mountain to the Sanctuary of Montevergine in her honor.”
Coker’s wall-drawings “Idanre” and “Abeokuta,” according to the school, “refer to the chronicles of the Yoruba orisa esu—the gatekeeper deity of crossroads, traveler of multiple realms. Similar to gateways, they recall transitional structures, navigational pathways, or maps into another world.”
“Canupa Inyan: Falling Star Woman” by Genia, of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate people, “depicts the Dakota legend of the a star-gazing young woman who travels to space, marries a star person, and gives birth to a star child. She decides to return to her people on earth and uses the cord of her woven dress as a rope to climb down from the stars. Finding it too short, she lets go and tumbles down to earth as a wohpe woman, a falling star,” the school writes.
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