Alumna Abbigail N. Rosewood '17 featured in Multimedia Poetry & Art Exhibit

Alumna Abbigail N. Rosewood '17 recently collaborated with She Who Has No Master(s)—a collective of Vietnamese women who engage in a collaborative art and writing process—and her work is now viewable in an online gallery space powered by Matterport. The exhibition was physically presented in Eccles Gallery at Salt Lake City Community College from October 8, 2020 to November 6, 2020. Read the exhibit chaplet here. 

She Who Has No Master(s), was founded in 2015 as "a group of Vietnamese women writers (including in this designation: cis, queer, trans, nonbinary) who in coming together aim to express the diversity and complexity of [their] diasporic experiences and perspectives." Each piece and series produced seeks to engage with different numbers and configurations of artistic voices, "with the belief that this poly-vocality, while honoring the nuances of individual visions and beings, also expresses the dynamic plurality and connectivity that exists within our diaspora." 

The 2020 exhibition, called She Who Has No Master(s): Would That, also features collaborative work by Angie Chau, Lan Duon, Anna Moï, Vi Khi Nao, Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Hoa Nguyen, Thao P. Nguyen, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Aimee Phan, Dao Strom, Sophia Terazawa, Stacy Tran, and Julie Thi Underhill. Each artist contributed "original writing and personal archival images from the pieces of the "Would That" series were shaped."

The work exhibited in the "Would That" series draws on the many "would thats" experienced by women of the Vietnamese diaspora—"hungers, silences, absences, wonder(ing)s, and wound(er)ings"—juxtaposed with the concept that the subjunctive mood does not exist on its own in the Vietnamese language, and must instead be conveyed through context. According to the women/womxn of She Who Has No Master(s), "what surrounds the action or description places it in or out of time. Which may be to say, what surrounds us is what places us in relation to: history, inheritance, the present, possible futures." 

Rosewood's contribution to the exhibit is based on her essay "The Debt of Love," published by The Southampton Review. Another of Rosewood's recent pieces, a short story titled "Hour-Glass," is forthcoming in Hypertext Magazine and has been nominated by the same publication for the 2020 Best American Short Stories. 

Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and lives in New York. Her debut novel, If I Had Two Lives, has been hailed as “a tale of staggering artistry” by the Los Angeles Review of Books and “a lyrical, exquisitely written novel” by the New York Journal of Books. The New Yorker said “the novel poignantly conjures the difficulties of reconciling the present with an ‘ungraspable history.’” An excerpt from If I Had Two Lives won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction Contest.