Maggie Wong
Maggie Wong is an interdisciplinary artist who creates installations, collaborations, publications, and pedagogy for reconstituting political inheritance. Maggie’s research-based practice questions static interpretations of knowledge by intervening in archives, engaging in autoethnography, fostering social networks, and visualizing kinship. Maggie is based in Boston, MA, and has presented work across the U.S. at well-resourced museums and scrappy DIY artist-run spaces and published in equally disparate imprints.
Maggie's work has been presented at Boston City Hall, deiner gallery, Boston Public Art Triennial, Interference Archive, Bathers Library, the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Comfort Station, Annas Projects, Temple Contemporary, YBCA, and 99cent Plus, and has been written about in ArtForum, Boston Art Review, Sampan, The Chicago Reader, and Sixty Inches from Center. Her writing has been published by Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, The Seen, and the Journal of Art Practice. Maggie is a 2024-2027 Studio Resident at the Boston Center for the Arts.
My practice accounts for the extra-sculptural possibilities of objects and archives. By way of collage, assemblage, publication and installation, my work deconstructs to build meaning like a stack of toy blocks, assembling and falling into a relational history rather than a fixed narrative. This approach acknowledges the impossibility of articulating an entire cultural or political inheritance, embracing Angela Davis’s idea that “legacies of past struggles are not static."
Three recent projects recast inherited politics. "Grounding Cord" is a nine-foot-long chain made of cast flowers, created in response to a mail art prompt from the choreographer Remy Charlip and inspired by Charlip's network of queer anti-war activists linked to the Flower Power moment. "UNITY," a series of prints and installations, explores childcare experiences amidst the publishing work of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), my parents’ multi-racial communist organization. The installation work and publication use archival and multi-media materials to stage radical children’s memories. The "UNITY" project extends into performance and play through a series of public table readings of my Unity Newspaper across several venues in 2025. "UTENSIL" is another work that extends beyond archival impulse into living camaraderie by casting my collaborators' gestures into utensils. When installed, the objects rest between written performance prompts that enact feminist facilitation, such as feeding one another in fellowship with materials and each other.
Beyond sustaining a practice of exhibitions, publishing, and programming, I aim to offer space that embraces collective and fluid knowledge that builds collectively and tracks the reproduction of love, memory, and adaptation.