From 1924 to 1929, the pioneering art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) constructed his 
Bilderatlas, or “image atlas” organized in 63 panels encompassing around a thousand individual 
pieces including reproductions of Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment artworks. He hung 
each on a wall in a deliberate topographic configuration, using the collective images to map the 
repetition of certain motifs and ideas across the ages. In doing so, Warburg hoped to identify 
and communicate visual and iconographic affinities he observed recurring throughout time in 
the work of different artists across cultures. He christened the project Mnemosyne, after the 
Greek titaness of memory and the mother of the muses and borrowed the title of his project 
from mythology in particular because he saw the presence of Greco-Roman themes in the 
Renaissance as a sign of cultural awakening, that after centuries of dormancy, the Greek gods 
were ready to imprint themselves onto the cultural landscape of sixteenth-century Europe.1 
Their resurrection from iconoclasm, to Warburg, was a sign of cultural memory and proof that 
certain images, ideas, and stories persisted in the imaginary of Europeans as they entered a new 
age. This gallery does not contain images of gods or titans, but in borrowing from Warburg's 
idea of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, we attempted to create a common thread between images and 
objects that evoke the idea of memory, questioning the pathways of cultural knowledge, 
embodied making, and image survival.

In this second part of the 2026 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, we include the work of Bendicta 
Opoku-Mensah, Lainie Ettema, and Nicholas Phitides. The work of Opoku-Mensah speaks to the 
idea of inherited memory and cultural practice via her convening of African women in the act of 
macramé. In Weaving Our Haven, the artist comments on histories of gender. Opoku-Mensah 
literally and figuratively weaves a tapestry of memory and survivance, grounded in the ideas of 
Africana Womanism that locates itself in the specificity of the global Black experience. 
Nicholas Phitides conjures the sublimity and uncanniness of memory in his paintings Faultlines
and Vandals (red sky) that draw equally from the language of mass media and the collective 
unconscious; things that we’d never think to notice—an abandoned house, a backyard 
conflagration, an eerie throughway—are made monumental and confrontational in their 
isolating and sinister environmental storytelling.

In Slippage, Lainie Ettema brings the liminal space of a restroom to the gallery. Her work 
renders the bathroom as her canvas, onto which a feminine body is abstracted and dismembered. 
By using this mundane site as the ground of vibrant abstraction, Ettema teases the boundary 
between individual and collective experiences with body, hygiene, and gender using the 
bathroom as a battleground of societal regulation. 

Memory is circuitous, unreliable, yet beautiful and profound to the human experience. We 
invite you to bring your own memories to the works and the gallery as you explore, however 
fleetingly, the Topographies of Memory.

- Graduate Assistant, Rónan Shaw M.A. Art History