Monica Ong: Planetaria

Planetaria is an exhibition of visual poems by Monica Ong that leverage the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. Playfully taking poetry off the page as handheld volvelles, broadsides, and installations, this series seeks to imagine the sky from a female perspective, examining the power struggles that myth-making elicits. Peruse “lost astronomy” prints made from diagrams and scientific syntax re-imagined as lyrical meditations on working motherhood and contemporary life. Explore letterpress and foil stamped Chinese constellation maps as poems that depart from gendered hierarchies towards new mythologies of the night sky. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one invites audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs. 

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. A Kundiman poetry fellow and recipient of a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, Ong has been awarded residencies most recently at the Studios at MassMoCA, Marble House Project, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. You can find her visual poetry in POETRY Magazine, Petrichor: A Journal of Text+Image, ctrl+v, Waxwing Magazine, Tab Journal, and Scientific American. In 2021 she founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects, many of which belong to distinguished institutional collections and museums nationwide.