Generational trauma is the psychological and emotional effects of traumatic events passed down through generations, impacting people who did not directly experience the original event. The term was first used in the 1960's when researchers observed the high rates of psychological distress experienced not just by Holocaust survivors, but also by the children of Holocaust survivors, who weren't even conceived until after the end of World War II.
In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora's box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers' room. Lead character Waldo is a high school senior whose life doesn't seem to be her own. She play-acts through sexual encounters and disassociates at the school disco (I stand off to the side watching, enveloped by a blanket of catatonia).
Pop's ex-wife was my biological grandmother, and there is no generation in our family that was not touched by her emotional, physical and financial abuse. In 1980, she kicked my teenage parents and me out of her house when I was an infant. She'd decided on a whim that my underemployed father and postpartum mother were able to make it on their own, without a single resource to their names.
So far, It: Welcome to Derry has mined this dynamic for numerous scares: Lilly's dead father sliced up into pickle jars, the pieces congealing into an octopuslike monster ordering his daughter to give him a kiss; Teddy's father's stories about the Holocaust transforming his son's lampshade into a lattice of screaming faces, all matted hair and stretched skin. These are nightmares made real, given cogency and urgency by how well they mine the sense that parents are both our first benefactors and our first tormenters.
Known for her conceptual practice that incorporates familiar objects and symbols from Black visual culture-including football equipment, peacock chairs, lowriders and butterflies-Mohamoud reimagines her source materials by transforming their scale and layering cultural references to recontextualize their interpreted meaning. The exhibition's title comes from Gil Scott-Heron's spoken word poem Comment #1 (1970), which earnestly describes the violence of racial and social inequality in America during that time.
The Faloduns at the centre of Cursed Daughters share tales of heartbroken women across the generations who just can't seem to hold on to a man. There's Fikayo, whose husband left after he tired of tending to her chronic illness; Afoke, who seduced her younger sister's boyfriend; Feranmi, the matriarch of the family, who got pregnant by a married man and received the curse from the man's first wife.
Jake is sweating bullets, having just quit his job and signed a $30,000-a-month lease on the new restaurant. Vince is telling him, "It's not a prison sentence." Wes and Estelle are conveniently having their meet-cute by the jukebox, while Roxie and Tony are back in the kitchen, about to be swept up in the "Isle of Joy" Vince is desperately trying to build.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn has never shied away from confronting the most difficult corners of the human condition. With ECHOES FROM COPELAND, his fifth solo exhibition with Gagosian, the acclaimed American artist channels fear, grief, and redemption into a deeply visceral body of work. The exhibition, currently on view at Gagosian's West 24th Street gallery through October 25, draws inspiration from literature and figurative abstraction to create an emotional terrain as fractured as it is full of possibility.
"My grandma was four when she was brought [to Stewart], and she was raised in violence by the matrons. She never had an opportunity to learn parenting skills from her parents. That experience, in my family at least, was the start of violence, alcoholism, and generational trauma. I have relatives who still will not step foot out here because our grandma was abused on a regular basis."
Karis Kelly's play, awarded the Women's Prize for Playwriting in 2022, masterfully captures a family’s reunion in Northern Ireland, focusing solely on the women present. The narrative navigates humor and pain through rich character dynamics and familial tensions, particularly expressed through the matriarch Eileen and her daughters Gilly and Jenny, each grappling with inherited traumas while humorously confronting their pasts.
At the heart of Richard Flanaganâs memoir is a reflection on the profound connections and choices that intertwine lives across generations, revealing both a legacy of trauma and resilience.
