Artist Bio

Yeabsera Tabb (b. 1998) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who then moved to the United States at the age of 13. She is currently based in New York City. She received her BA in Design for Social Impact and Fine Arts from Indiana Wesleyan University (2021) and an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design at The New School (2025). 

Her  works have been featured in solo exhibitions across Indianapolis including The Tube Factory ArtSpace, Harrison Center, Garfield Park Art Center, 1000 Words Indy, 1920 Gallery and in group shows at New Fields Museum of Art, BUTTER, and One Drop among others. Her works  were reviewed by Hyperallergic (NYC), Sixty Inches From Center (Chicago), The Indy Reporter, Tube Factory Art Space and Harrison Center blog (Indianapolis). 

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Harrison Center and Tube Factory Art space where she worked on her commissioned solo exhibitions and community centered art initiatives. She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Artist Statement

My artistic endeavor is a practice of being present and witnessing. I think of it as a language one that is in constant flux and in a state of friction. I recognize this language as a habitual mode of witnessing and slowing down. My personal responsibility is to reflect on the world around me, drawing on my lived experiences to consider my place in it. 

I find this language in my everyday investment and conversations with materials, as well as their emblematic relationship to politics and social relations. Slowness has been a key material in my work, as I explore how memory is held within our bodies, objects, and physical structures. Sifting through my lived experience as an Ethiopian-American artist, I work to create spaces for tending to our collective memory. The process of remembering is both an act of archiving and survival. To remember is to preserve. 

I make installations that encourage slow walking and grounding while also being a poetic space of questioning, grieving, and witnessing. This creates a place where our collective memories often impacted by colonial and imperial violence – are tended to with care and intention. My installations are not altars to perfect memories, but transient spaces in which to reconcile the imperfection of recalling the past with the present and future.

I gather, write, and rewrite this material language through forms, gestures, and physical spaces. I encounter this language not in the defined moment but in the constant reckoning. This language materializes my grief, anger, love, and fragmented experience in the way they come alive through my body, through my hands, and the physical space.

Using textiles, clay, and collected organic materials such as fruit skins, seeds, and shells, I draw from my background in collage and printmaking to render compositions that waver between the thresholds of 2D and 3D. I leverage the varying opacities created by layering fabrics and organic materials to mimic the brief moments of clarity in the otherwise ambiguous endeavor of remembering.