Mother Tongues

Visual art, poetry and translation

Grand Lobby and 2nd Floor

The exhibition Mother Tongues dovetails the visual art of Alva Mooses with the writings of Aracelis Girmay, Cecilia Vicuña and Mirene Arsanios. The result is an assemblage of voices that speaks to the diasporic experience, and in particular, to themes of translation, ancestral memory and cultural transformation.

Mooses’s work spans a variety of materials. Hammered metal sculptures, ceramics, prints and spatial drawings that seek to restore connections between the body and the natural world. A ceramic globe series—ear to the earth/culebra, truena, tormenta (snake, thunder, storm) —conveys colonialist systems of language and mapping through the weight of clay. Meanwhile, hammered metal cutouts celebrate Mexican metalworking traditions and call forth indigenous iconography of animals, earth, and sea. In acts of material translation, she has printed these aluminum cutouts on paper and clay, and collaborated with musician Carmen Maldonado in Mérida, Mexico to transform them into percussive instruments.

Mooses' dialogue with poet Aracelis Girmay appears woven throughout the exhibition and in a forthcoming book. Mooses' art finds further resonance with the artist, activist, filmmaker and poet Cecilia Vicuña, who shares five collections of poetry and art in publication form in Mother Tongues. Writer Mirene Arsanios' essay Notes on Mother Tongues: Colonialism, class, and giving what you don’t have (Ugly Duckling Press) is a touchstone for shared concerns of language and identity, also on view in the exhibition. All offer visions on how to salvage and repair, how to fortify the collective imagination in a time of ongoing political and ecological ruptures borne out of colonization.

In the words of Girmay, to undergo change and engender new meaning in a world defined by rupture is the "struggle to hold both armor and dreaming at once."

Opening Event: April 18, 6-7:30 pm, Grand Lobby, Central Library. REGISTER HERE

Alva Mooses is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and has completed fellowships and residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Center for Book Arts, Greenwich House Pottery, The University of Chicago, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, and SOMA in Mexico City, among others. Her recent projects received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Research Foundation of CUNY. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes works across genres. She is the author of the poetry collection the black maria, Kingdom Animalia, Teeth, and the forthcoming Green Of All Heads (fall, 2025). Recent collaborations include picture books, a chapbook with book artist Valentina Améstica, and a current commission for the stage. A recipient of the Whiting Award and the Metcalf Award, she was also a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, among other honors. Recent works (poetry and prose) have been published in Astra, The Paris Review online, Periphery Journal, Jewish Currents, The New York Times Magazine, and e-flux. Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections (BOA Editions).

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98 weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday nights reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1948) is a visual artist, poet, filmmaker and activist based in New York. She created the autonomous concept of "Precarious Art" in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what disappears. Her poetic work in space, performance and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision, that anticipates ecofeminism. “Arte Precario” stands as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. She was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in London in l974. In recent years Vicuña has exhibited at the Toronto Biennial; Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Turbine Hall, TATE, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kunstinstitutt Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; MUAC, Mexico; CA2M, Madrid; and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia. Her retrospective “Soñar el agua” was recently on view at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, and MALBA, Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca, Sao Paulo. Her monumental quipus are currently on view at the Modern Art Warsaw and Pérez Art Museum Miami. 

_{*  Photo by Daniela Aravena. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.}