Just wanted to let you know that I'll be a featured reader for the Arts @ Night series at the UNH on Tuesday.

Here is an excerpt of their press release.

NEW HAVEN, CONN. --- A nationally recognized poet and an experimental poet/artist will have poetry readings at the University of New Haven on Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 6:30 p.m.

Patricia Smith, author of six books of poetry, and Monica Ong, an artist and poet, will read as part of UNH’s Arts@Night series in the Alumni Lounge in Bartels Hall, located on the UNH Main Campus in West Haven.

The program is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the UNH English department and the Elm City Review. For more information, call (213) 932-9991 or email: rhorton@newhaven.edu.

I'm pleased to share that my visual poem "Corona Mestiza" has recently been published in the Summer 2011 issue of the Lantern Review, a national journal of Asian American poetry.

This piece is a portrait of my father, told through the visual language and typography of the CT scan.

The opening of Critical Condition: When Silence Speaks was a great success! Thanks to Steve Olsen, my installation specialist, for all his hard work. Check out the highlights of the evening as well we the work.

The exhibition will be up through September 16, 2011. Please contact the Parachute Factory at 203-764-7594 for directions and gallery hours. They did tell me they can make weekend appointments.

Critical Condition opens on July 12 at the Parachute Factory in New Haven. It is an exciting group exhibition not only of artists but also of citizen storytellers via the Center for Digital Storytelling's Silence Speaks Initiative. This exhibition seeks to expose the stories about health that you don't hear, narratives that are underreported, undocumented, and untranslated. And I felt really compelled to open a space for these stories to exists in so that we can think about how it informs the way we seek out health. It seeks to question the structure of the global healthcare system where it is all too easy for women or the other to be invisible.

Featured artists
Liana Dragoman, Monica Ong, Silvia Rigon, and the Center for Digital Storytelling

Operning Reception
Tuesday July 12, 6–8 pm

Gallery Hours
Wednesday: 10 am – 2 pm
Thursday + Friday: 12–5 pm
+ by appointment

Parachute Factory
Erector Square, Building 1
319 Peck Street
New Haven, CT 06513

Statement
This exhibition positions the body as a stage – where embedded beliefs and social constructs collide and re-emerge as transformative narratives about cultural anomalies in public health. These artists and storytellers gather voices of witness and meditation, asking questions that are poignant but pointed.

What happens when a woman’s body cannot be translated? Why do scars persist and what do they teach us about silenced histories? When aberrations in cell growth spell out a terminal condition, what happens to our illusion of security? How do we contend with stigma in the face of sexual abuse or mental illness? These ruptures call on us to revisit – and redefine – the social conditions from which they erupt, spill, and burn into our shared memory.

DOWNLOAD PRESS KIT

Please support this collective of women artists for Critical Condition, an exhibition giving voice to important community issues in public health. All donated funds will help to make this show possible at the Parachute Factory, a collaboration between the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), the Community Services Network of Greater New Haven (CSN), and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

Thursday, May 19 @ 7pm
The Institute Library, 847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

The Poetry Institute of New Haven - I'll be part of the regular Open Mic, which will be followed by featured reader Dimitris Lyacos.

Sunday, May 22 @ 5pm
Verlaine, 110 Rivington St, NYC

Kundiman & Verlaine Reading Series - I'll be part of a oint reading with The Acentos Foundation: Rich Villar, Monica Ong, Christina Olivares & April Naoko Heck

Saturday, June 4 @ 4pm
Supper Club Reading Series - A fusion of fine poetry and fusion dining, I'll be reading alongside Shelly Oria. (Did somebody say Chicken Adobo?)

Please support this collective of women artists for Critical Condition, an exhibition giving voice to important community issues in public health. All donated funds will help to make this show possible at the Parachute Factory, a collaboration between the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), the Community Services Network of Greater New Haven (CSN), and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.

Featuring new work by artists Liana Dragoman, Monica Ong Reed, Silvia Rigon, and the Center for Digital Storytelling.

This exhibition positions the body as a stage – where embedded beliefs and social constructs collide and re-emerge as transformative narratives about cultural anomalies in public health. These artists and storytellers gather voices of witness and meditation, asking questions that are poignant but pointed.

What happens when a woman’s body cannot be translated? Why do scars persist and what do they teach us about silenced histories? When aberrations in cell growth spell out a terminal condition, what happens to our illusion of security? How do we contend with stigma in the face of domestic violence or HIV/AIDS? These ruptures call on us to revisit – and redefine – the social conditions from which they erupt, spill, and burn into our shared memory.

I decided to begin work on a map of Missing Words, and want to ask for your contributions. What are words are missing in some of the languages you know. How does it highlight underlying powerstructures that are in control of that language and how certain kinds of oppression are seen or unseen?

View The Map of Missing Words in a larger map

February 3 – March 12, 2011 : AC Institute

Recent works by Monica will be featured in a group exhibition "See You on the Flip Side!" on narrative and identity at the AC Institute in the Chelsea gallery district in New York from February 3–March 12, 2011. The exhibition will feature the "Remedies" series as well as the completed "Old Timer's Dis-ease" series that reflects on the cultural-medical experiences in her multi-generational family. 

Mother as a Boy, 2001

I grew up making art and regularly doing creative activities ever since I could remember. But if you were to ask me when I really began my art practice, it was upon discovering a photograph while rummaging through the hallway closet in my childhood home. That photograph was a portrait of my mother's family. It was easy for me to make out her sisters and brothers. The woman in the center was too young to be my Grandma - she was a nanny, I believe. The curious thing about the photo was that I could not locate my mother.

Instead, I noticed that there was a third brother in the image, a strikingly handsome boy standing second from the right. When I asked my mother about this curiousity, she told me that for many years in her childhood, Grandpa demanded that the nanny cut my mother's hair and dressed her in boy's clothing so that she could pose as a boy in the family portrait. Since portraits of this kind are often passed around or mailed to distant relatives, Grandpa felt embarassed that he'd had so many daughters. A family's source of pride is its sons, he believed.

Starting with that image, I created a collage incorporating flora and fauna from my grandmother's garden and placed flowers at my male mother's feet in memoriam to her gender, which was erased, obliterated from sight. Since that initial discovery, I've been visiting and revisiting the feminine space of erasure and silence, as well as the context from which female worth is measured, or worse, destroyed.

I have an obsession with the fallacy of "perfect" family, the "perfect" baby, which in Asian culture, begins with having a boy. In my recent apothecary series, I explore these desires in the space where medical and cultural choices play out.

I came across another image in my parents' closet of a baby boy with its pants off. It stumped me at first why on earth he would be undressed that way for a photo. But my parents later explained to me that many people in those days photographed their newborns that way to prove without dispute that they indeed had a son. And seeing how my Grandpa was more than willing to deceive his friends by hiding my mother's real identity, it all made sense. The photo was a form of evidence, a masculine space of exposure and declaration.

Wouldn't it be interesting, I wondered, to create a baby formula that allowed the mother to transform her fetus into this symbol of familial pride? What if the formula could change the child's gender, endow it with exceptional potential, and even eliminate homosexuality? You could say I was exploring the border between cultural fantasies and one's responsibility to ethical choices when dealing with biological reality.

When I make work with these images in mind, I am conscious of the fact that these small, everyday casualties of choice set the stage for the irreversible societal damage that is all too often lamented in hindsight. While my mother's gender was hidden, many baby girls are often "disposed" of once and for all.

This past March, the Economist reported: "Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now." The sex-ration imbalance in China has not only resulted in more single males, or bare branches, but now contributes to higher rates of "crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates."

In an interview with my Grandmother, I asked her to tell me about the early years of her marriage. She struggled to conceived but knew that she wanted to have a boy. "There are no fireworks when girls are born," she told me. It wasn't that she didn't like my mother and her 4 sisters - it was just a fact of the times she lived in. When you're poor, girls are perceived as a financial drain, while boys are considered breadwinners. At the same time, when you have traditions and social hierarchies stacked against you, it is going to take a toll somewhere. When society as a whole places less value on your gender, and it's a position your own parents take, it is going to affect you, consciously or unconsciously. As one physician and colleague writes: "Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one’s mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially when one can find evidence that it represents a true account."

My apothecary series draws from the aesthetics of vintage 19th century remedies, in a time when quack remedies were often peddled to desperate but willing buyers. Today, there are parallels as medical technology advances, whereby pharmaceutical marketing is looked upon with mistrust, and the smuggling of ultrasound technologies continues to feed unchanging cultural demands.

This year, I've had the privilege to design websites for some outstanding creative organizations and people. Here are the highlights! First, is Kundiman, an organization promoting the poetry of Asian-American writers. They offer wonderful opportunities for writers and also are a force for bringing incredible people together from across the country.

http://kundiman.org

This is a screenshot of the page for Oliver de la Paz who is the author of several collections of outstanding poetry. I wanted to create something serene but striking that was also inspired by landscape and memory.

http://oliverdelapaz.com

Finally, a redesign for Andrew Reed Studio, LLC, featuring a modified blogging system that neatly displays this designer's new works.

Next in the pipeline is to revive my other blog at theLune.org and to finally make headway on some online narrative works as well.

http://andrewreedstudio.com