IN-PERSON ART AND POETRY INSTALLATION
On view beginning Friday, August 1, 2025
Free to the public during Museum opening hours
Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have – A something overtakes the Mind –
“Did you ever read one of her Poems backward,” Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of wrapping paper, “because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—A something overtakes the Mind.” Although we’ll never know which poet Dickinson was referencing here, it’s clear that she felt the need to alter her approach to the poems at hand as a means of entering the work. A Something Overtakes the Mind—a multimedia visual art and poetry installation created by Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan for the Emily Dickinson Museum—takes a cue from these words from Emily Dickinson and, through explorations of domestic objects, biographical details, found poetry, and community testimonials, seeks to find new ways of engaging with the poet’s life and legacy.
Opening on August 1st, this art installation, the first of its kind at the Dickinson Museum, will be installed in the ground floor of the Homestead in the house’s woodshed, laundry room, and kitchen. Although the project’s focus will be centered on two primary sets of objects from the Museum’s collection—the wallpaper fragments recovered from Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, and fragments of unassembled quilts—the installation will also incorporate a wide range of objects curated from the collection.
The Museum’s former woodshed and laundry room will house the wallpaper fragments, as well as a series of shapes laser-cut in order to precisely follow the contours of the archived wallpaper scraps. These created forms will contain not only fragments of the Dickinson’s work, but also curated, century-spanning text that addresses the poet’s life and work in various ways: some of the text will be comprised of biographical descriptions of Emily Dickinson’s writing process, and some will contain interpretations of Dickinson’s use of the em dash in her poetry (a form of punctuation that is echoed in the wallpaper’s corresponding design).
A display of the Museum’s quilting fragments will be installed in the home’s former kitchen, along with a series of shadowboxes and vitrines housing arranged composites of language and objects. Whereas the featured items will include a wide range of domestic objects from the Museum’s collection, the accompanying text will be created by arrangements of the legible words and letters written on the household paper scraps that were used as backing during the creation of a quilt in a technique known as paper piecing.
Lastly, in the room known as the Poets’ Lounge, there will be interactive displays that allows visitors to create their own lines of poetry derived from the words found within the quilting fragments, as well as a video installation that will include interviews with a wide-range of community members reading and reciting Dickinson’s poems, and discussing her life and work.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US. Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources. Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England. Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague. Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.