"I started writing the pieces that would eventually become exhibits when I was up on a deadline for new work but couldn't generate anything...so instead I experimented with ways to creatively destroy and repurpose things (text, image, ideas)."

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and teaching artist from Seattle, and has spent most of her work time working with youth. She has received fellowships and residencies from Jack Straw, the Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives near the Salish Sea with her cat. Arianne is the 2023-2025 Washington State Poet Laureate.

exhibits

Artist Reflection

The pieces included in this collection are from a completed (but at the time of writing, still unpublished) manuscript called exhibits. That collection is a series of experimental poems that bring you through a museum exhibition, and the poems are reading you as much as you're reading them. The museum engages with how the experience of childhood trauma doesn't end when you turn eighteen: the effects ripple, even for decades, finding new ways to manifest and asking to be healed. Given the history of Natives and American museums, the museum form is also a perfect place to repatriate a stolen body, and the artist in the collection hopes to do just that across the course of the work.

I started writing the pieces that would eventually become exhibits when I was up on a deadline for new work but couldn't generate anything. My brain was struggling and would not cooperate with making anything, so instead I experimented with ways to creatively destroy and repurpose things (text, image, ideas). It was all I could do with where I was at the time, and over the next five years this practice kept expanding and finding new corners of the museum to fill out, and took on a lot of new forms. The pieces here are all from the first section of the book, and specifically within that the first gallery in the museum, though the whole project itself has three very different sections.

I had to learn new techniques for writing to finish a more cohesive narrative work across a whole book's length, and I had to keep growing alongside the work to get it all to the place it wanted to be. I love this project for all it’s taught me and all it’s let me do and explore, and especially for the time I got to turn the entire manuscript into an immersive multimedia installation (you could walk around inside the book!) with massive support from the Seattle Repertory Theater as their first Native Artist-in-Residence. I felt so held by the poems.

Please enjoy your brief stay in the museum.