Exhibit: The Spirit of Invention by Tim Hawkinson

On exhibit until April 14th at Pasadena City College is Tim Hawkinson's Spirit of Invention. It's a short visit, but there are a few noteworthy pieces to consider, primarily his Average Vitruvian Man and Thumbsucker. Admission is free. It's a quick stop but an enjoyable one.

Hawkinson is recognized internationally for his creativity. His approach is to mix "high tech and low tech in unexpected confluence, his resulting artworks are a wonder of creative ingenuity. Because of his remarkable spirit of invention and the wonderfully unpredictable outcomes of his inquisitive postulations."

His 2016 Average Vitruvian Man references the famous Vitruvian Man drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, which was based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry and classical architecture. Here, all the main body parts have been photographed in the round, and averaged into identically sized 8 1/2 x 11” prints wrapped around plastic soda bottles.

Hawkinson's work has been called "a playful dance with life itself." In his 2015 Thumbsucker, we see a moon "formed from enlarged and reduced casts of the artist’s mouth, and the astronaut is formed through casts – also enlarged and reduced – of his thumb and fingers. " 

Pasadena City College notes that "This exhibition of Hawkinson’s work offers a sampling of artworks throughout his career, in hopes that the viewer may witness this ongoing thread of creative genius, this unexpected, serendipitous pairing of high and low that marks Hawkinson’s innovative process of discovery."

Per his bio:
Tim Hawkinson's (b. 1960, San Francisco) idiosyncratic creations are meditations on nature, machines, mortality, the body and human consciousness. Since the 1980s, the artist has used common found and store-bought materials, handcrafted objects, and machines to shift familiar subject matter off-kilter, creating visual conundrums and conceits imbued with deeper meaning. His inventive works range in size from monumental kinetic and sound-producing sculptures to almost microscopic pieces created from such unassuming materials as fingernail clippings and eggshells. Driven by ideas, materials, and an interest in transformation, Hawkinson continues to create unlikely and thought-provoking associations by transforming common materials into works of art. Hawkinson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015.

[Road Trip] Museum of Neon Art, Glendale, CA

Founded in 1981 the Museum of Neon Art is a definite treasure of Southern California. The Museum of Neon Art "encourages learning, curiosity and expression through the preservation, collection and interpretation of neon, electric and kinetic art. Neon is a gateway between scientific principles and artistic expression. Neon illumination integrates electrical technology, creative design, and fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry."

The Museum of Neon Art currently holds the distinction of being the only museum in the world devoted exclusively to art in electric media, exhibiting electric and kinetic fine art, and outstanding examples of historic neon signs, for over 30 years. Which may sound like hyperbole, but I found it to be an apt description.

Presently, their main exhibit is the art of plasma, which I found extremely fascinating. It's on display until July 30th, and well worth the visit no matter what your artistic discipline. There's much to consider with this medium, and I'd love to see how Lao artists might take on such a form even as it would require an engagement with the sciences and the humanities in a way that not all of us have ready access to.

It's been 18 years since the Museum of Neon Art last presented an exhibit on plasma, and director Kim Koga was a wonderful host during my visit recently, putting it all into context.

Here are just a handful of the amazing and wonderful displays I saw:

I particularly appreciated this because we often think of neon art as a very two dimensional affair to appreciate primarily from a single angle, but here the plasma art made a very good case that much of it must be seen from 360 degrees, and the very best pieces allow for tactile engagement, although the general public rarely gets to do so. Private collectors would do well to obtain such wonders.

Presently, the MONA is open only from Thursday to Sunday, typically from noon until 7pm, except for 5pm on Sunday. Admission is typically $10 or $5 if you're a Glendale resident. Children under 12 can come for free. It's located at 216 Brand Street and is near some good restaurants and shopping before or after.

Parking is somewhat tricky because the back lots behind the museum fill up fast, but it is not impossible.  $35 also gets you a year's membership, which I think is more than reasonable to preserve such treasures.

Serial Flirtations: Rotari’s Muses Opens at Norton Simon Museum

This weekend the exhibit "Serial Flirtations: Rotari's Muses" opened at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.

As they note in their introduction, "Rotari began his career in his hometown of Verona. As he gained recognition, he traveled widely throughout Italy, studying the works of Venetian, Roman and Neapolitan artists. In these early years, he painted primarily religious and mythological subjects. But by 1750, when he was called to Vienna to work for Empress Maria Theresa, and then Dresden, where he was summoned by King Augustus III, his attention would turn to painting bust-length portraits of elegant members of their courts. In 1755, Rotari was summoned by Empress Elizabeth of Russia to work in St. Petersburg, where he and his prolific studio would produce hundreds of depictions of young girls, all of them demonstrating varying degrees of emotion—subtle, but clearly legible. The painter’s virtuosity for such work earned him great acclaim, both for his talents and his prodigious output..."

As a whole, the installation commemorates Rotari’s inclination to summon his muses and celebrates the 310th anniversary of the artist’s birth. 

This is also the last weekend to catch Van Gogh’s iconic ‘Bedroom’ on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago and see it in person, not just on postcards or a computer, to get a sense of its size and shape, and its true tones and colors as they've endured over the decades  when it was first painted in 1888, nearly 130 years ago. This is the first time this particular painting has ever been displayed on the West Coast!

The Norton Simon Museum is known around the world as one of the most remarkable private art collections ever assembled. Over a thirty-year period industrialist Norton Simon (1907–1993) amassed an astonishing collection of European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century and a stellar collection of South and Southeast Asian art spanning 2,000 years.

Approximately 1,000 works from the permanent collection of 12,000 objects are on view in the Norton Simon Museum’s galleries and sculpture garden throughout the year. The museum is closed on Tuesdays. Adults are $12. Seniors are $9. Students, veterans and youth under 18 get in free. On weekends, it opens at 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. (5 p.m. on Sunday)

Parking is free, and it is located at 411 W. Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91105-1825. The turn into the driveway can come up a little fast, as an FYI if it's your first visit there.

Notably, if you time it right, admission is free for all visitors the first Friday of every month from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Legacies of War Exhibition: Tinney Contemporary Gallery, February 25 - March 25

This weekend the Legacies of War exhibition by Sisavanh Phouthavong opened up in Tennessee at the Tinney Contempoary Gallery. Sisavanh Phouthavong is one of the first professional Lao American visual artists and educators of her generation. The opening reception will be held on March 4th.

I did a profile on her work previously, having been deeply impressed with her art since I first encountered it several years ago. We recently met face to face for the first time at the National Lao American Writers Summit in San Diego.

This new body of work is inspired by the organization Legacies of War (legaciesofwar.org). Their mission statement: "is to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos and advocate for the clearance of unexploded bombs, to provide a space for healing the wounds of war, and to create greater hope for a future of peace."

Over 5,400 Lao refugees resettled in Kansas in the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War that ended in 1975. Through her powerful acrylic work, she confronts the challenges of bicultural memory and documentation. She considers notions of the abstract and the concrete for those who must remember both their inner and external histories in a diaspora framed by secrecy and loss. Her work probes what is shared, what is felt, and what must remain deeply personal among the lessons passed on to the next generation as it heals and rebuilds.

The Tinney Contemporary Gallery is located at 237 5th Avenue North, Nashville, Tennessee 37219. They specialize in collectable modern art by established local, regional, national, and international artists. They present a series of rotating exhibitions throughout the year and participate in the First Saturday Art Crawl on the first Saturday of each month.

[Road Trip] The Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum is one of the interesting art museums in Southern California that I've come to appreciate. They have a remarkable private art collection, starting from a thirty-year period when industrialist Norton Simon (1907–1993) amassed a collection of European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century as well as works from South and Southeast Asia representing over 2,000 years of history. Some 12,000 objects in total are a part of the collection, with 1,000 of them on active display.

Here are a few of my favorite pieces from their permanent collection.

The Buddha and Shiva at the Norton Simon Gallery make for a great juxtaposition when one considers the fundamental differences and interrelationships of their symbolism. There's a particular Indiana Jones vibe as you make your way through the lower level's South and Southeast Asian collection, which also includes this elaborate wooden temple wall from the Kerala region of India depicting the life of Krishna, from the 1700s: The colors are still vibrant and wonderfully evocative, certain to spark the imagination.

Alberto Giacometti is one of my favorite sculptors for his unflinching, almost harsh pieces that seem to suggest the world crushing people into nothingness. But I like another more optimistic interpretation I came across once that proposed for all of the crushing void the cosmos embodies, there's something still pushing outward, pushing back, in resistance, pushing itself into being.

Back in the 90s, I briefly had a fiancee who thought she looked like a shorter Jeanne Hébuterne, who served as the muse to Amedeo Modigliani. Hébuterne had a tragic life, eventually throwing herself out a window. Didn't end up with the girl, but I always notice a Modigliani when I see one, So, for that I'm grateful.

Juan Gris always has my admiration for his for his "Still Life With A Poem" a cubist painting from 1915. Over 100 years later, as a poet, I can say that the experience has indeed changed very little, at a certain fundamental level. The text of the abstract prome poem at the bottom is by the poet Pierre Reverdy, for whom Gris did a series of watercolor illustrations in his lifetime. And I think there's much to be said when visual artists and poets collaborate together and work in concert to challenge our expressive limits.

They have a wonderfully detailed Indian chess set that you won't want to miss, depicting various soldiers, war elephants and steeds ever ready to settle some imagined conflict between two players who come together in some fine space.

This piece always makes me wonder how a Lao artist might have executed it, like Thep Thavonsouk. Hassel Smith (American, 1915-2007) painted "Tiptoe Down to Art," in 1950, while Smith was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).

According to the Norton Simon Museum, "Tiptoe Down to Art" refers to when he heard a teacher instruct her students to tiptoe downstairs to the school’s art room. While at the CSFA, Smith taught alongside such notable artists as Clyfford Still, Ansel Adams and Richard Diebenkorn. Along with visiting faculty Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, the Michigan-born Smith was stimulated into exploring more abstract imagery, while often approaching his work with a great sense of humor. "I wish to feel free to appreciate life without relating to it, either its beauties or its ugliness, in any necessary way to my painting. My paintings are intended to be additions to rather than reflections of or upon life."

I think this would resonate with many of our Lao artists around the world.

If you're planning to go, the museum is closed on Tuesdays. Adults are $12. Seniors are $9. Students, veterans and youth under 18 get in free. On weekends, it opens at 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. (5 p.m. on Sunday) Parking is free, and it is located at 411 W. Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91105-1825.

Road Trip: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

This week we take a look at the storied Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a collections-based educational and research institution established in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington in Pasadena, California.

Beyond books, the Huntington is home to an amazing and extensive art collection including permanent and rotating displays that make it well worth a visit if you're in the area.

The primary focus of the art collections are 18th and 19th-century European art and 17th to mid-20th-century American art. The gardens are also magnificent to behold and include landscaped gardens, including a Japanese Garden, a Chinese Garden and a Desert Garden. To its credit, I think it's difficult to take it all in in a single day, and it warrants repeat visits to get the most out of it.

This season, among the special exhibits worth catching are Lari Pittman: Mood Books, Real American Places, Becoming America, and the Orbit Pavilion.

Closing on February 20th, Los-Angeles based artist Lari Pittman is known for his exuberant, colorful, and graphically complex works. Huntington visitors can see the artist at his hallucinogenic best in this exhibition.

Six monumental illustrated books, each opening to more than four feet in width, contain 65 paintings by the artist. They draw from a variety of aesthetic traditions, ranging from decorative art and design to advertising and folk art. Combined with Pittman’s brilliant draftsmanship and acidic color, the images advance an astute and acerbic social commentary embedded in narratives rich with real and invented mythologies.

As someone who's worked closely with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, I have an appreciation for books that challenge our sense of what a book might be beyond those intended for the mass market, and this was a provocative exhibition. It closes February 20th.

The poet in me appreciates the dialogue between the poet Walt Whitman and photographer Edward Weston in Real American Places, on display until March 20th.

In 1941, the Limited Editions Book Club approached Weston to collaborate on a deluxe edition of Whitman’s poetry collection, Leaves of Grass. The publisher’s ambitious plan was to capture “the real American faces and the real American places” that defined Whitman’s epic work. Weston eagerly accepted the assignment and set out with his wife, Charis Wilson, on a cross-country trip that yielded a group of images that mark the culmination of an extraordinarily creative period in his career. On the other hand, the book didn't sell that well and the resulting prints became mostly a footnote barely mentioned in Weston's storied career.

Weston's approach appears not to have been a literal interpretation of Leaves of Grass opting to take a broader inspiration of the concept, and though he typically kept extensive notes on what he was taking pictures of, it's difficult to find many references to what seems like it should have been an extraordinary journey. At this point in my life, this resonates with me at many levels as both a photographer and as a poet.

Up until October, 2019, The Fielding Wing's inaugural exhibition, Becoming America showcases more than 200 works from the Fieldings’ collection of 18th- and early 19th-century American art works, including paintings, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, metal, needlework, and other related decorative arts. Meanwhile, the Orbit Pavilion will be up until September this year, and as a speculative poet, I strongly encourage you to visit. The outdoor installation is the brainchild of Dan Goods and David Delgado, visual strategists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who conceived an innovative “soundscape” representing the movement of the International Space Station and 19 Earth satellites.

In their permanent collection, I'd definitely also encourage you to take a look at their Gutenberg Bible, a copy of the Canterbury Tales, and their display on Paradise Lost. 

Their notes on Paradise Lost brought into focus for me that it was written in the aftermath of the English Civil War and resulted in many of the words we continue to use in English today such as "pandemonium," "terrific," "debauchery," and "stunning," and as a work that might well be considered speculative poetry, it makes me wonder what words Lao who've survived our civil war might invent and add to the Lao language and others.

If you want to visit, the hours are typically from 10-5, but it's always closed on Tuesdays. The last ticketed entry time is 4 p.m. The library and art galleries close at 4:30 p.m. and guests are encouraged to begin exiting at this time. The Huntington is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Independence Day. Admission is between $23-25 for adults and students can enter for $19-21 depending on whether it's a weekday or weekend visit.

Art Exhibition: Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre 9/16-1/17

Recently at the Norton Simon Museum, they held the exhibition Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre in Pasadena, California. Unfortunately I missed this one but one can get a bit of sense of the items exhibited through the five-minute introductory video at Vimeo.

The significant premise of the exhibition was that "Lurking on the fringes of the 20th-century art world was something sinister, something not necessarily identifiable or easy to fit into a specific movement such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art or Minimalism. The exhibition Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre looks to mine the dark recesses of the mid-20th century and explore the creations made to exorcise the demons that plagued artists."

The exhibit was composed of assemblage, painting and lithography, with works by Edward Kienholz, Joseph Cornell, Clare Falkenstein and Jess, among others.

The Norton Simon Museum's earliest example was a closed box by Kurt Schwitters, entitled  Lust Murder Box No. 2 from 1920–22, which they felt foresaw the fascination with the macabre among artists in later decades. The title for the piece was based on a damaged plaster figure that once lay in the box and daubed with lipstick to make it look “bloody.”

The question we might ask then is how have our techniques changed in the way we depict the human struggle to engage with morbid subjects such as death and evil in its various, often horrifying forms.

Asians Doing Everything: Sisavanh Phouthavong-Houghton

Lao American visual artist Sisavanh Phouthavong-Houghton was recently given the spotlight at Asians Doing Everything. Be sure to check them out as well as her breathtaking body of work at her website.  I very much appreciate the stellar art she is creating, bringing a compelling sense of the abstract to the Lao expressive vocabulary.

I'm excited for her this month because she will be holding a solo show from ​Feb 25-March 25th 2017, The Legacies of War, at Tinney Contemporary Gallery, Nashville. Her Reception/Talk will be March 4th 6-9PM.

Sisavanh Phouthavong-Houghton is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro where she teaches advanced level painting courses.

She was born in Vientiane, Laos in 1976 and as I mentioned previously in 2015, I am intrigued to see where she takes her work compared to other visual artists from Vientiane like Vongduane Manvong and Sompaseuth Chounlamany. My fellow writer Catzie Vilaphonh and I are also from Vientiane, so, we shall see over time if there is a distinctive approach we each take, compared to Lao from other regions.

At the age of four, Sisavanh's family emigrated from Thailand to Winfield, Kansas. She attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting in 1999.

Sisavanh continued her education at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale where 2003 she received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting and Drawing. She has exhibited her work in solo, juried, and invitational exhibitions throughout United States, Canada, and New Zealand.

Functionally, she began her professional arts journey at around much the same time I did, with her first solo exhibitions in 2002 at Vergette Gallery in Carbondale, Illinois, Smell of Art Through Culture, and Dri-Bottoms. This was approximately the same time I'd been reconnecting with the Lao community through the SatJaDham Lao Literary project in the Midwest.

Ten years ago in 2007 was a busy and pivotal year for me as I released my first full-length book, On The Other Side Of The Eye. Interestingly, it was also very busy year for her, including her solo exhibition Things That Suck, at the Joan Derryberry Art Gallery at Tennessee Technological University, in Cookeville, TN.

Her work had also been selected in 2007 for the exhibitions Ideal, at the  Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery, and Rat Race, at the Ivan Wilson Fine Arts Center, Western Kentucky University. That same year she was part of the  Four Person Exhibition at the Ruby Green Contemporary Art Center, E-Volution 2, at Dangenart Gallery, Undercurrent, at Vanderbilt University Law School, and Group 62901, a group exhibition at the Well Street Art Company in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Sisavanh resides in Woodbury, TN with her sculptor husband Jarrod Houghton, their two daughters Zoe and Ava, and two cats Mr. Peacock and Gwen. I was delighted to meet her in person for the very first time after so many years of studying and teaching her work during the National Lao American Writers Summit in San Diego in 2016. I feel her approach and technique are tremendously important during the Lao reconstruction if we are to fully enjoy and embrace a Laotian American Renaissance.

This new body of work of hers is inspired by the organization Legacies of War (legaciesofwar.org). Their mission statement: "is to raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam War-era bombing in Laos and advocate for the clearance of unexploded bombs, to provide a space for healing the wounds of war, and to create greater hope for a future of peace."

 As a refugee, the process of connecting and disconnecting with a place or community are abstracted ideas of migration as an immigrant. The collage and painting process is unpredictable and is an ongoing dialogue about assimilating and relocating into another culture and space.

Her work captures and embraces architecture and built environment in its state of flux. Teetering between realism and abstraction, she is folding space and time to connect with the fleeting world. To achieve a kaleidoscopic effect, she employs multiple viewpoints, rhythmic fragmentation, and strong color contrast to fuse both the contemporary and historical landscape elements into one.

I'm looking forward to seeing where her artistic vision takes her next.

Lao French visual artist Alisa Phommahaxay featured at Little on the Prairie

Be sure to catch the interview with Lao French artist Alisa Phommahaxay over at Little Laos on the Prairie as she brings French street art to Vientiane. The exhibit took place from January 6-15. You can keep up to date with her work and other projects at http://alisa-gallery.com/ and on twitter @ALISA_GALLERY although they could stand to be a bit more active in keeping things up to date.

"Forget Nothing," released by Lao American visual artist Chantala Khommanivanh

Congratulations to Lao American visual artist Chantala Khommanivanh, who recently announced his first limited edition selfpublished art book, "Forget Nothing." This 40 page 8″x8″ hardcover book contained photographs of paintings he’d done from 2010 through 2016. The edition was limited to 50 copies and they are all hand numbered and signed. It quickly sold out upon release. Here's hoping he'll feel encouraged to make more in bigger editions in the future.

Chantala Kommanivanh is both a visual artist and has an active role as one half of the dynamic hip-hop duo “Maintenance Crew” with whom he has released 4 full-length albums.

His work has been displayed in four solo exhibitions in the Chicago area galleries and has been included in numerous group and invitational exhibitions in the U.S. He received his Master of Fine Art at UW-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts in 2014 emphasizing in painting and drawing.

Throughout his career Chantala achieved numerous awards such as the Union League Civic Arts foundation award and a two-time A.O.P Fellowship award recipient. Chantala Kommanivanh currently lives and works in Chicago as a practicing visual artist and a professor of the arts at Northeastern Illinois University. He's been a regular featured artist at the National Lao American Writers Summits.

He recently unveiled his newest painting, “The Last President of the United States” at Little Laos on the Prairie. Be sure to check it out. The Last President of the United States, 2017 measures 40″x40″ and is made with Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas. You can learn more about Chantala at: https://chantalism-art.com/.

Refugee Cartography and the Imagination

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

As the adopted son of an American pilot who flew in Laos during the Secret War, our house was filled with various topographical maps and globes, charts, calculators and measuring devices that captured my wonder even as so much of it was an abstraction to me, as it would be to any child.

When I first tried to understand where I was from, around the age of three or four years old, I was shown a globe and where we were in Missoula, Montana then to where Laos was supposed to be, as if that would explain everything. That the world could be understood in terms of maps and a few photos of a distant country you're promised you'll see one day, if things change enough.

Today, it's been almost 15 years since I was able to at last return to Laos after 30 years, searching for my long-lost family and reuniting with them in Modesto. It's been 20 years since I began searching in earnest for my roots among my fellow refugees in diaspora which would take me from college in Ohio to Washington, D.C. to countless states where nearly 400,000 of us were rebuilding our lives.

Some dwell in the major cities, many more in remote corners you'd scarcely have anticipated Southeast Asians to appear. From Anchorage, Alaska to Merced or Morganton, Saint Paul, Lowell, or Elgin, these cities have become indelibly intertwined with our stories. And all of this has brought me to consider questions of a new cartography.

How do we map our world, in our own words, on our own terms?

A question that's occupied me as part of the Laomagination project has been who defines the borders of our experience? Even in the age of the GPS, a map is always something of an abstraction as we place our marks on our papers and screens.

When we're born, we come into a world that's been here before us, filled with names and borders defined often long before our arrival, with their histories and significance to others that we might learn. But landmarks mean different things to different people at a personal level and a community level. How do we capture those significant spaces in our lives for the generations who will follow?

A case in point that illustrates this might well be the Frogtown quarter of Saint Paul, or King's Canyon Boulevard in Fresno.

Even as the mainstream community would point you to Saint Paul landmarks such as the Fitzgerald Theater that is home to A Prairie Home Companion or the Landmark Center, I would easily argue that spaces like the Sunrise Market on University Avenue or the Lao Family Community building holds deeper personal meaning to the Hmong and other refugees who began arriving in the 1980s.

Certainly, as a poet, I've done a great deal of work leaving literary breadcrumbs to remember the spaces that meant so much to us on our first decades in America. My particular concern has been to note not only how we've remembered such spaces but how we might express their potential future to us. To consider that future we see ourselves in, and to contemplate it in terms of both our inner and external lives.

One of the key exhibitions I helped to organize was the 2010 Legacies of War: Refugee Nation Twin Cities interdisciplinary exhibition at Intermedia Arts with the non-profit Legacies of War, TeAda Productions, and Pangea World Theater that brought together visual art, poetry, theatrical performances, film, and other disciplines to mark the ratification of the United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions and the issue of unexploded ordnance that continues to contaminate over 30% of Laos forty years after the end of the Secret War.

Among the more challenging parts of the installation was a massive wall map of the United States, Our Shared Journey that made an effort to gather brief personal stories and photos of our fellow Lao refugees where they were across the US today and to map where their families were from on a map of Laos that used the US government's records of where over 580,000 missions dropped over two million tons of bombs from 1964 to 1973.

Part of what made it so challenging was that many of our elders knew the names of the cities and provinces they came from but could not readily point to it on an American-style map. Because Lao geography is so rarely taught to our youth in the US, one can imagine the frustrations, even as one then questions what it means to even map our stories in such a fashion.

One of the books that came into my life during my formative years was James Cowan's A Mapmaker's Dream.  As the publisher notes, "In sixteenth-century Venice, in an island monastery, a cloistered monk experiences the adventure of a lifetime—all within the confines of his cell."

Part historical fiction, part philosophical mystery, A Mapmaker's Dream told the story of Fra Mauro and his struggle to "realize his life's work: to make a perfect map—one that represents the full breadth of Creation."

In Cowan's book, "news of Mauro's projects attracts explorers, pilgrims, travelers, and merchants, all eager to contribute their accounts of faraway people and places. As he listens to the tales of the strange and fantastic things they've seen, Mauro comes to regard the world as much more than continents and kingdoms: that it is also made up of a vast and equally real interior landscape of beliefs, aspirations, and dreams. Mauro's map grows and takes shape, becoming both more complete and incomprehensible. In the process, the boundaries of Mauro's world are pushed to the extreme, raising questions about the relationship between representation, imagination, and the nature of reality itself."

For those of us in diaspora, I think such questions are deeply important, as is the notion of decolonizing cartography, and remembering there's more than one way to depict the world and to map our encounters, our sense of where we might want to return, and what we might warn others, perhaps in the same vein as the mariners of the ancient world once marked Terra Incognita or "Here there be monsters."

An arts installation from the early 2000s I often think of is Sanford Biggers' The Cartographer’s Conundrum. It was an installation, film and website inspired by artist, scholar and Afro-futurist John Biggers. A cousin of his subject, Sanford Biggers’s goal was to both study and expand the emerging genre of Afro-futurism, which engages science-fiction, cosmology and technology to create a new folklore of the African Diaspora.

Biggers began by traveling through western Africa along the same route John Biggers followed in the 1950s, meeting with colleagues and family members along the way. In its final form, his project included a new multimedia installation, as well as an exhibition, lecture, catalog and website chronicling John Biggers’s contributions to Afro-futurism.

Many of my readers can see how I've taken on the question of mapping our diaspora and our imagination in poems such as The Dream Highway of Ms. Mannivongsa, which appeared in my 2013 book DEMONSTRA, which included a map where the borders of our various Lao provinces were much more abstracted to symbolize an idea that our traditional legendary beings likely did not observe our demarcations of territory in quite the same way as mortals.

In  the 2015 issue of the (Re)Collecting the Vietnam War, I continued many of the same questions, seeing what happened if I tried to summarize the major provinces of Laos in an American haiku style. More recently my poem "Vientiane in 12 Haikus" in Abhay K.'s 2017 anthology Capitals sought to consider the possibilities of how we might challenge longstanding descriptions of our cities and spaces.

I'm always hopeful such poems will not be the last word for such spaces, but instead demonstrate that even our humblest streets can be worthy of poetry and human memory. One day, I'd greatly enjoy seeing how my colleagues from the Iu Mien, Khmu, Tai Dam, Akha, Hmong, or Lue community write about the spaces we share, and the ones we don't, in both Southeast Asia, the US, and many of the other nations where we can be found today, and hopefully tomorrow.