Opening Reception for “A Something Overtakes the Mind” at the Emily Dickinson Museum
Photo: Emily Dickinson Museum
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 – Emily Dickinson
Sources: Emily Dickinson Museum and Amherst Regional Public Schools
The in-person art and poetry installation, “A Something Overtakes the Mind” opens at the Emily Dickinson Museum on August 1 and will run through December 1. The installation is free to the public during the Museum’s open hours, Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. There will be an opening reception on Friday, August 8, from 5-7 p.m. The public is invited to join the artists and view the exhibition with wine, cheese, and live music by ‘Fair and Softly.’ The opening is free to the public — registration not required but you can let the museum know that you are coming on the Facebook event.
“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.
On August 1, 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. In 2026, 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.
Work of Fort River Elementary School Students Included
Included in this exhibit is a multilingual video of Fort River Elementary School students reading Dickinson’s poetry aloud in Spanish, Korean, and English. Their participation was supported by Fort River ESL educators Nate Durning and Lissa Pierce Bonifaz, who helped coordinate the recording process in May with parent permission. The readings are now part of a larger collaborative installation by Bouton and Donovan, created in partnership
with the Emily Dickinson Museum and The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
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.
ABOUT FAIR AND SOFTLY
“Fair and Softly” is a small band that particularly explores music for English Dance, a social dance that was popular in Emily Dickinson’s lifetime. Indeed there are some dances in her personal music book. We imagine that playing this old music while celebrating a new installation for the Homestead is a fitting background to the exploration of 19th century poetry. We hope that our period instruments invoke the sounds and sensibilities of the age.
Aaron Hayden is an engineer at Amherst College and has been involved in early music since elementary school; he currently plays and sings in several early music ensembles in the Pioneer Valley.
Madeline Zanetti is a graduate of New England Conservatory with a degree in Music Performance who has been active for many years in early music performance in Colorado and New England.
Sue Matsui is a school music teacher and church musician who has been in love with early music since childhood, and plays a variety of medieval instruments.