Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother · Exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology
“Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother” Exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology
Vancouver, Canada · December 4, 2025 — March 29, 2026
artwork by Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien
co-curated by Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien, Kate Hennessy, and Hannah Turner
molo is pleased to support Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. “Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother” is an exhibition that honours and extends the ancient structures of Northwest Coast weaving practice through contemporary technologies.
petal pink textile softwall designed by Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen for molo, is used as a practical division and backdrop, but also as an expanded metaphor for the Repetto boxes included in the exhibition and the vertical weave of the baskets and robes. Arranged in a large circle, the shape is a welcoming one which promotes connectivity, nurture, and matriarchal lineage, softening the traditional cube of a gallery and drawing guests together to experience the works. Like the weavings, softwall displays its internal structure as both form, function, and strength—an interlocking lattice that both shapes and defines.
In conversation with Forsythe and MacAllen, Jaad Kuujus-Meghann O’Brien drew connections between softwall and woven room dividers used by earlier Northwest Coast societies. These woven walls were used to create privacy while maintaining a certain openness that is typically limited by traditional walls. They held people together, rather than concealing and creating distrust. Forsythe and MacAllen experienced similar processes for transformational and emotional spacemaking while visiting and researching coastal communities in Colombia as part of their graduate work. These early discoveries influenced their own design thinking and development of the soft collection.
