Fall 2025 News

Dear colleagues, friends and family, 

I’m trying to keep this missive brief, in contrast to last year’s. The intervening 12 months have been pretty awful in multiple ways, yet I continue to engage with the world, pretending there will be a future that makes some kind of sense. 

Bad news first. Mid-June marked a year since my hand surgery and it’s now clear: I’m not going to get any better. Part of me still wants to hope that in the future I might be able to work more than 3 hours a day without it triggering a complete physical breakdown, but I can’t count on that and need to start living within these new limitations. It’s a lot to process, especially because there will never be any recompense for what’s been lost.

The good news is that I still managed/am managing to do things:

  • Through the end of October, I’m an artist-in-residence at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I’m working to complete the strip club floorplan drawings I began in L.A. 2 years ago. I’m excited about where these are going (toward installation, using UV reactive inks, concept sketch above), and I’m looking for opportunities to exhibit these starting in 2026.
  • At the beginning of the year, I taught b&w darkroom-based photo for the first time in 25-years (!) at Saint Louis Community College’s Florissant Valley campus. It was a joy, despite throwing out my back by looking at students’ work prints. I’ve missed teaching.
  • I completed a set of drawings with my left hand conceptualized with the community collaborARTive, a community art project led by con christeson in which I’ve been participating since shortly after moving to Saint Louis.
  • I was juried into the Cleveland Institute of Art alumni show again! Juror Maria Seda-Reeder chose to include The GRIND. This was particularly meaningful for me, since my time at CIA was very much a skirmish in the “feminist sex wars“, and I still carry a lot of damage from that.

I’m also launching a Patreon specifically to support a new body of text-based work. I’ll be sending a more detailed email in October (two emails in one year!), but I’ve already posted information for the curious.

As always, I love to receive your replies and hear your thoughts.

Best wishes,

Monica

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