Overview

September 13, 2025 — June 14, 2026

Curated by Alexander Jarman, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Academic Outreach

Jamea Richmond-Edwards is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, collage, and painting. For the past decade, much of her work has foregrounded the communities and cultural signifiers of her hometown of Detroit, and has served as a means of processing and contextualizing her own life’s journey and as a meditation on larger social and environmental concerns. Most recently, her wide-ranging research interests—which span religion, history, mythology, and ancestry—have informed monumental paintings that offer complex narratives addressing humanity’s shared histories while also centering the Black diasporic experience. For her exhibition at the Wellin Museum, Richmond-Edwards will present existing works alongside a newly created video and suite of paintings, displayed within Baroque-inspired frames. Points of inspiration in this body of work include the biblical stories of Exodus, the Afrofuturistic cosmology of jazz musician Sun Ra, the exploration of terrestrial continents both real and imagined, and the impending effects of climate change upon our planet’s most vulnerable geographies. 

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the seventeenth-century dystopian literary work of the same name Mundus alter et idem, an imaginary account of a voyage to the oceans south of Africa written by Joseph Hall (1574–1656) as a satirical indictment of the power structures of early modern British culture. In Richmond-Edwards’s new works, she adapts this narrative to focus on a fictive character of her own making, Iceberg, who appeals to Black citizens of the world to join an oceanic caravan to Antarctica, where a new, egalitarian society might be established. This fictionalization presents the inherent challenges for a utopian state located on a rapidly shrinking continent, and mirrors the contemporary crises of nations that are either under threat from rising sea levels or are exploring the promises and pitfalls of self-determination and independence.     

Jamea Richmond-Edwards (b. 1982, Detroit) earned a BA from Jackson State University (2004) and an MFA from Howard University (2012). Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, California African American Museum (Los Angeles), Charles Wright Museum (Detroit), Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington), Frist Art Museum (Nashville), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Phillips Collection (Washington, DC). She is a 2018 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and her works are included in the collections of the Rubell Family Collection, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program.

The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art’s programs are made possible, in part, with funds from the Daniel W. Dietrich ’64 Arts Museum Programming Fund; the Johnson-Pote Museum Director Fund; the John B. Root ’44 Exhibition Fund; the Edward W. and Grace C. Root Endowment Fund; and the William G. Roehrick ’34 Lecture Fund.