BIRMINGHAM.- Experience a powerful reimagining of The Family Album, exploring the beauty and depth of family connections across time while celebrating the body as a site of history and memory.

This first major solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Marcia Michael is a ‘massive love letter’ to family and celebrates the sense of belonging and joy found through family connections.

The Family Album is a deeply personal exploration of kinship that pieces together a rich family history through contemporary photography, sculptures, ceramics, and print design. The works of the British artist of African and Caribbean descent centre around three interconnected series: The Study of Kin, The Family Album, and The Object of my Gaze. These moving collections, archived as a revolutionary act of remembrance, display Michael’s ongoing journey to reconnect with and preserve memory, love and identity.

Michael’s intimate portraits of herself and close family members - particularly her mother - explore how the human body can serve as both a physical and emotional vessel for recorded histories. These works echo resilience across generations and highlight the uplifting power of family bonds. For The Family Album, MAC commissioned new pieces from Michael, including a unique necklace featuring miniature bronze sculptures representing the bodies of mother and daughter.

Through her diverse artworks Michael aims to foster a sense of familiarity and belonging that are centred within the home. This showcase invites the visitor to reconsider the traditional interpretation of a family album and encourages them to (re)connect with their own family histories from a new perspective.

Marcia Michael, the artist of The Family Album, said: “The Family Album ultimately defines my unconditional love for my family past, present and future. It creates and holds space where images and artefacts lie in wait to be seen touched and remembered. It is always imagination that keeps the past alive! As time passes it becomes important that there is a place where one can access and retrieve the whispers of this past. As well as relocate their visual, tangible and auditory memories into the voices of new kin as they take over.”

Dominque Nok, curator of The Family Album, said: “The Family Album is a beautiful reflection of Marcia’s personal and artistic journey. Every detail is carefully crafted, revealing stories that will undoubtedly resonate with the visitors. I am truly amazed by how Marcia, through her art, creates tangible visual connections to the past in such a meaningful and genuine way. We also laughed a lot while we explored her collections together. Showcasing The Family Album at MAC and collaborating with their teams has been an absolute pleasure. I loved helping Marcia present her work in this space, and I can’t wait for everyone to come and experience it for themselves.”

An exhibition catalogue of The Family Album will be for sale at MAC’s bookshop from 5 April 2025.

Marcia Michael (b. 1973, London, UK) is an award-winning British multidisciplinary artist of Caribbean and African heritage who challenges the representation of the Black subject within the family album by reconstructing her own family archive. With great sensitivity toward her sitters and environments, her work encompasses captivating matrilineal photography, self-portraiture, moving images, sculptures, poetry, sound pieces, and drawings, using both traditional and non-traditional media.

Through photography as both a mode of documentation and conversation, Michael renews and reimagines a transdisciplinary tradition of storytelling, seamlessly connecting past, present, and future. Her work guides the viewer on a journey through temporal dimensions, weaving together Black feminism, intergenerational visuality, African diasporic traditions, and the representation of the Black mothering body. Michael's practice reimagines and restructures history through the empowered, political, and self-loving Black body.

She studied photography at the University of Derby (1996) and earned an MA in Photography with distinction from the London College of Communication (2009). In 2024, she was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of the Arts London. Her body of work has been shown internationally. The Object of My Gaze, exhibited at Autograph ABP, London (2018), and Tate Britain (2022), builds on her earlier series The Study of Kin and The Family Album (2009).