Dear Friends,

While the weather may be cooling down, our calendar of cultural activities and offerings is compensating by rapidly heating up! We wrap up this month on Saturday, September 30 with the Motion State Dance Film Series Season Launch, and welcome the new month on Monday, October 2 with the opening event for New Battambang Market, an exhibition of work by artists Dana Heng and Moy Chuong (see Sophia’s exploration of the artists and their work below).

New Battambang Market is the first project in our three-part pop-up series, during which the Joan T. Boghossian Gallery will evolve throughout the fall as a site of art exhibition, on-site cultural exploration, and collaborative community art making. Stay tuned for details of part two: the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee partnering with blackearth collective + lab to create workshops exploring Langston Hughes’s intersectional identities and his time at sea; and part three: Brenda Adames, PPL’s Maker Education Manager, collaborating with the Programs & Exhibitions staff to curate a community exhibition, From the Workshop, featuring a selection of pieces created by participants during weekly Workshop makerspace activities happening throughout the fall.

In next week’s Cultural Content we’ll bring you an interview with Dr. Arthur C. Jones, who joins us on Saturday, October 14 for a community workshop, “The Wisdom of the African American Spirituals Tradition: From Slave Fields to Concert Halls,” followed by a book signing of his newly reissued Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals (thanks to our friends at Barrington Books!). Details and registration info are here. This event is co-presented with All Saints’ Memorial Church, which will present “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a concert with Dr. Jones and the RI College Choral Program on Sunday, October 15, details are here. (Dr. Jones will be visiting from his home in Denver, but Providence has a place in his heart, as it was the longtime home of his late brother, Ferdinand Jones, a beloved Professor of Psychology at Brown University and an ardent and eloquent advocate for the humanities.)

There is so much more news of events to come in the weeks ahead! While you’re waiting for our additional calendar announcements, here’s something to do this week: Artist Eli Nixon, creator of the Bloodtide exhibition currently exuberantly animating PPL’s Atrium, invites you to join them for an online drawing workshop this Friday, September 29! Learn more and register here.

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Sophia recently had a chance to talk with artists Dana Heng and Adam (Moy) Chuong about their upcoming exhibition, New Battambang Market, here’s her dispatch from the gallery:

If you found yourself poking around on PPL’s third floor recently, you may have noticed the boxes filling the Joan T. Boghossian Gallery. Over the past week, Dana Heng and Adam (Moy) Chuong have been installing their upcoming exhibition, New Battambang Market, which opens Monday, October 2. Moy, who is a Teochew American artist and educator, and Dana, an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator, are both recipients of the 2022 Interlace Project Grant. The culmination of their work with Interlace is taking form, transforming the gallery into a multilayered evocation of shared experiences beyond time, memory, and loss through diaspora and Asian American dis(identity).  

The now towering boxes once contained an assortment of fresh produce and goods from two of Dana’s aunt’s grocery stores here in Providence: Sky Market and Sunny Market. While the final form of these boxes is yet to be realized in the gallery, I find so much beauty in this process of building, which connotes moments of remembrance. The title New Battambang Market is a transgenerational homage to a store of the same name on the South Side of Providence that Dana’s parents used to own in the early 2000s. The name has a genealogy to Battambang province, located in northwestern Cambodia, where her family has roots. Dana recounts moments in her parent’s store: fragments of plastic green grass lining the wooden shelves, Dana stuffing limes into foam netting, then folding that netting into the shape of apples… “I would just hang out and do my homework. My mom made bánh mì sandwiches some days. There was an upstairs, which was where all the storage was… and I just remember upstairs being just a maze of boxes.”

Before meeting with Dana and Adam, I was struck by these echoes of lineage and the mysticism formed in the channels of in-between. What does it mean to be within diaspora— a place of neither here nor there? How do we see ancestry in everyday objects, or how can these objects evoke memories of distance, entanglement, and kinship? These are some of the questions both Moy and Dana have been contemplating throughout this project. With these queries, I gravitated toward Moy’s ceramic practice and piece, Petrochemical plasticity (which will be featured in the exhibition).

They explain, “I’ve been trying to understand a relationship to plastic and the aesthetic of plastic, also how plastic is moved around the world. I have a very nostalgic attachment for plastic, being that it is something that is, as Heather Davis talks about in her book Plastic Matter, pervasive all around the world and simultaneously specific to every culture. It represents every culture because it’s so generalized and ambiguous. And so I’ve been mostly trying to understand from, I guess, a queer lens of how I can have an affection for plastic while recognizing the global impact of it.” Moy is deeply intentional when creating this piece by holding memories of friends and family as they mold the plastic furniture into clay— the plastic, an observable material, transfigures into an aesthetic of lineage.

As both artists use a process of re-creating household objects, the works they shape form a magical amalgamation of spiritual linkages. Like Moy with their ceramic (plastic) chairs, Dana recalls memories through her practice: “I find myself making things that are coming from an object, an image, just from my memory or childhood… I don’t even think about them or don’t feel like they're important. They’re not a pivotal thing that changed my life, but they were around… I’ve been making these little jars that are really tiny, based on an object that my grandma has. I looked up images of them online, and these things are now traded as art or art artifacts, but they’re also just a traditional, everyday household object that in my mind is just like a tiny detail of this whole bigger world.” In the practice of recalling, Moy talks about watching a Chinese Opera with their grandmother, and how that experience became a passage to queer imagining that inspired the creation of their Spirit Houses, one of which will also be on display in the exhibition. Spirit Houses are “places for you to be able to commune and connect with ancestors or spirits and deities,” a communion which “is tied to a queer mythology around these two snake spirits that are often represented as being sisters, and one of them falls in love with a human and then is betrayed by that human, but then the other sister comes and saves her.”

While the artifacts Dana and Moy sculpt may take a similar form to the objects that inspired them, they are made with new material, something that is fabricated through intentional yet unintentional ancestral interconnectedness. It is an intimate archive of history and communion: “I’m trying to pull up these narratives and then represent them in these traditional objects,” Moy explains. Dana and Moy bring to the forefront how the mystical is present in the mundane and how ancestry and memory are enmeshed in their practice. Dana states, “I feel like those objects are kind of magical because they are like spirits that are hanging around that informed the whole universe that I was growing up in.” In looking at Danas and Moy’s work, I keep going back to this idea of process. Could process end up being a finished product? Or the antidote to feeling disconnected? Or maybe somewhere in between? Moy and Dana’s art can guide us to ask, how can we rest with these multilineage fragments and invoke them not just in what we create but also in how we navigate the day-to-day? Moreover, how can we think of process itself as a desired end?

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After multiple years of building renovation and COVID restrictions, we are thrilled to be able to present varied, robust cultural programming throughout our beautiful library again. We hope you will join us often during the celebratory season ahead!

In gratitude,



Christina Bevilacqua xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSophia Ellis

Programs & Exhibitions Director xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxCommunity Partnerships Facilitator