For Immediate Release
Contact:
Patrick Fecher
publicrelations@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
A Something Overtakes the Mind — a multimedia visual art and poetry installation created by artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan for the Emily Dickinson Museum — takes a cue from the words of 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.
The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025 through December 21, 2025.
Emily Dickinson wrote on a scrap of wrapping paper, “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.”
On August 1st, the Emily Dickinson Museum will open an art installation featuring the work of visual artist Ligia Bouton and poet Matt Donovan. The installation will be on view on the ground floor of the Homestead in spaces that historically served the Dickinson family as their laundry room, kitchen, and dining room. Following the exhibition the Museum will prepare this part of the historic house for the third and final phase of Homestead restoration.
In addition to other objects from the Museum collection, the installation is anchored by two significant sets of Dickinson family objects: wallpaper fragments from the poet’s bedroom and pieces of unassembled quilts. Visitors will encounter laser-cut forms echoing the delicate contours of the wallpaper scraps, filled with curated texts spanning centuries, including biographical insights and interpretations of Dickinson’s signature “em” dash, poetically mirrored in the wallpaper’s design.
In the kitchen space, quilt fragments will be paired with shadowboxes and vitrines containing domestic objects from the Museum’s collection. Paper scraps remaining on the quilt pieces showcase legible text, forming the basis for artistic language collages and found-word poetry.
A final feature will invite audience interaction through a hands-on poetry-making station using words from the papers enclosed in quilt fragments, alongside a video installation featuring community members reading Dickinson’s poetry and reflecting on her enduring legacy.
Artists Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan state, “As an artist and poet collaborative team, we’re always looking for ways to explore intersections of text, image, and objects, and the idea of working with the Emily Dickinson Museum seemed like an extraordinary opportunity to delve into a life and body of work that we already found fascinating, especially given that we drive past the poet’s home nearly every day. As we’ve developed the video component of our project–a short film titled “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” that is comprised of community interviews–it’s been really wonderful to speak with so many folks in Amherst and to hear about their own connections to Dickinson’s life and work, and the extent to which her poetry remains a source of ongoing fascination, solace, and inspiration.”
Megan Ramsey, Collections Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum says, “The Museum’s collection had remained largely undocumented and inaccessible up until 2023 when we completed a three-year cataloguing project and published our first online database. It’s thrilling to see that the publication of the collections database directly led to new interpretations of Dickinson’s material life in the form of this exhibition from Bouton and Donovan.”
The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours and will be on view beginning August 1, 2025. Visitors should check in first at the Carriage House. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, August 8, 2025 from 5-7pm ET.
Learn more about A Something Overtakes the Mind:
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/a-something-overtakes-the-mind/
For press-approved images:
https://bit.ly/Photos-ASOTM-EDM
ABOUT THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM
The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to sparking the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home.
The Museum comprises two historic houses—the Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens—in the center of Amherst, Mass. that were home to the poet (1830-1886) and members of her immediate family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of the Trustees of Amherst College. The Museum is overseen by a separate Board of Governors and is responsible for raising its own operating, program, and capital funds.
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.
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.
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Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s work can be found in, or forthcoming from, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & elsewhere. Day is the 2024 Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence and an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing in the MFA Program at NC State.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide including Amherst College. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow in Writing.
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and was named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released from Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State Poet Laureate from 2015-2019, Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, and photographer born and raised in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants, and she currently resides in Mississippi. Her debut full-length collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed, is forthcoming with CavanKerry Press in March 2025, and it was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing and photography have been published widely, and she has received several awards and honors including a 2025 Literary Arts Fellowship and a 2024 Artist Mini-Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a 2024 Mississippi STAR Teacher Award, a 2024 Vance Fellowship from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, the 2023 Poet of the Year Honoree of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a semifinalist position in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, a nomination for the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award, and an honorable mention prize in the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award for poetry. Nadia’s photography has been exhibited in several shows in the U.S., Cuba, and virtually. A fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole, and the Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Publicity Incubator, she holds a PhD and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi.
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.