Assembly 2026: Common Wealth
FEATURED ARTISTS: Beatrice Opokua Atencah, Michael Dela Dika, Nicholas Malik Izon
GUEST CURATOR: Colleen Foran
Common Wealth uses archeology as a metaphor to consider history’s residue, how it surfaces in our present, and how artists excavate meaning from these materials. It brings together work by Beatrice Opokua Atencah, Michael Dela Dika, and Nicholas Malik Izon, three artists who were born elsewhere but now call Pennsylvania home. Atencah uses textiles to reflect the ways migration can contort, compress, and reshape identities. Dika’s sculptures combine clay with found objects, including excavated pottery, to draw attention to how identity is constructed. Izon’s work investigates the spiritualities of the Black Diaspora as a means of embedding collective memory for future generations.
Common Wealth considers the commonwealth’s present-day multicultural reality alongside its complicated historical legacy. This legacy, and its ongoing effects, are still contested, evolving, and being updated based, in part, on the excavation of materials from the past. Two-hundred-and-fifty years after Philadelphia hosted the signing of the Declaration of Independence, informational panels were removed from a nearby site where George Washington once lived. The dismantled display discussed an archeological project that had surfaced pottery, porcelain, and masonry walls from outbuildings where at least nine Black people lived and worked alongside the Washingtons, who enslaved them. These findings pieced together more about the lives of Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Shields, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll, and Joe, who are otherwise absent from narratives about Pennsylvania as the birthplace of freedom.
This excavation, and the attempts to bury the historical reality it represents, point to the historical weight carried by everyday materials. The artists in Common Wealth use their material practices to engage with the collective promise and perils of the United States at its semiquincentennial. This history is our shared inheritance, our common wealth.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Colleen Foran is a curator and a PhD candidate at Boston University (BU), where her research focuses on contemporary West African art, specifically public and participatory art in Ghana’s capital of Accra. She has conducted extended research in Ghana with support from BU’s Arts Initiative and Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship. While working in BU’s African Studies Library, she co-curated exhibitions from its collection of archival textiles.
Foran holds an MA and a Graduate Certificate in African Studies from BU. Her recent publications include peer-reviewed articles in Source: Notes in the History of Art and and tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, in the curatorial, editorial, and advancement departments. Foran has taught at BU, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
ABOUT ASSEMBLY 2026
Common Wealth is curated by Colleen Foran and takes place as part of Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s national biennial exhibition. With an eye towards the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, MoCA Arlington’s 2026 biennial comprises four separate, concurrent exhibitions. Each exhibition is curated by an independent curator and grounded in a specific geography within the regions that made up the original thirteen colonies. This curatorial framework provides a new lens for exploring current material and conceptual trends within contemporary art while highlighting artists and curatorial voices from across the United States.
Assembly 2026 is organized by Blair Murphy, MoCA Arlington Senior Curator + Director of Exhibitions and is generously supported by an anonymous donor.
RELATED EXHIBITIONS
Assembly 2026: Dusk in the Dawnland
Assembly 2026: New South, Ground Truth
Assembly 2026: to eat out their substance
RELATED PROGRAMS
Art After Hours
Saturday / October 3 / 5pm-8pm
EXHIBITION CATALOG
View the Assembly 2026 catalog
