Summer Happenings

Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey

current Exhibition

For those of you on the East Coast, you still have all month to catch Monica Ong: Planetaria at the Hunterdon Art Museum, which is on exhibit in New Jersey through September 3, 2023. I’m so grateful to curator Hildreth York for her elegant introduction:

Art and poetry have long been companions, raising the question of whether one should talk about poet-artists or artist-poets. However, there is no word in English to describe the work of Monica Ong. For her, poetry and art are not conjoined; they are indissoluble. In Planetaria, concept, content, and form have coalesced in each artwork.

Context is an essential element in Planetaria: Ong has studied the ancient Chinese cosmos, the social and cultural ideologies and mythologies that emanate from ancient Eastern philosophies. She is cognizant of their complex and resonant connections with contemporary social structures. Inventive and imaginative, they reveal attitudes and behaviors, past and present. Knowledge of astrology, astronomy, science and poetry are catalysts for the artist’s critical awareness of the traditional roles of women. The “female gaze” is an over-arching component of Monica Ong’s art.

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Newberry Library, Chicago

Honors

Many thanks to the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for awarding me a 2023 grant in Poetry. I’m grateful for their generous support and helping to make my impossible projects possible.

This summer, I’m in residence at the Ragdale Foundation thanks to the Sylvia Brown Fellowship that will make it possible for me to continue developing exciting work in visual poetry. During my stay, I visited New Trier High School at the invitation of John O’Connor and Tom Lau to give a reading and talk to several summer school classes who had thoughtful questions and were absolutely lovely. I’ve also had an opportunity to visit the Newberry Library for research and also attend a book arts workshop with Ben Blount hosted by Artists Book House.

Studio news

Please note that I am focusing my social media engagement on Instagram at @proximavera. I will no longer be posting to Twitter as sometimes less is more.

In other news, I was delighted to be a panelist at the Gathering hosted by the Flowchart Foundation in Hudson, NY last month. You can find the recording and lively conversations celebrating the experimental impulse of poetry on their website for your enjoyment.