Julia Kim Smith

Concrete Poetry 2 is an interactive outdoor installation of 100 free-standing cast concrete letters placed on a platform of concrete pavers. Visitors to The Ivy Bookshop’s gardens are welcome to move the letters and compose poetry. On occasion, work by noted authors is featured.

Since opening in May 2024, the installation has been continuously changing, featuring greetings from the bookshop, work by noted authors, and, when it is in open-mic-and-almost-anything-goes mode, ephemeral messages left by visitors in the gardens. View Concrete Poetry 2 Instagram feed

Please handle the letters with care. Concrete was chosen as a medium because it is inexpensive and durable–but it can break. If a letter is broken, please set the pieces aside, next to the sign. Broken letters will be repaired.

The gardens are family friendly, so please refrain from the use of profanity and abusive language in your poetry.

As public art, Concrete Poetry 2 is an expression of community trust. It is permanent and mutable. As often the case with public art, permanence and immutability can prove to be elusive. Through the installation, the artist queries: how do we move forward in an impermanent world?

Concrete Poetry 2 is set in Clarendon, a slab serif with a bold, sturdy structure. It was created by Robert Besley for Fann—later Thorowgood and Co.—type founders (U.K.) in 1845 and exists today in modern iterations. Haas Clarendon was introduced as the U.S. National Park Service standard by Chermayeff and Geismar in 1975 and was in use on park signage until 2000.

FABRICATION
Jonathan Ceci Landscape Architects, First Floor Graphics, New World Gardens, Orlando Products, Piece of Sign, Remington Artist Services, Julia Kim Smith

November 26-December 12, 2024 (extended)

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.”
—James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times, 1962

From Ploughshares, March 21, 2023:
In the New York Times Book Review in 1962, Baldwin explicitly confronts the idea that writers like Hemingway and Henry James were “sacrosanct” and “touchstones” used to reveal the “lamentable inadequacy of the younger literary artists,” himself included. In his essay “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” he argues rather that they are the inadequate representatives of the American experience because they have all failed to deliver what his title promises. Instead, “One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed.” At issue in this statement is the essential innocence of the American character, that the virgin continent was mysteriously despoiled rather than, as Jill Lepore recently formulated it: “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” That any kind of experience, even the “inexpressible pain” of “innocence being lost” “which lends such force to […] the marvelous fishing sequence in The Sun Also Rises,” does little to address what that innocence conceals. Individual experience can’t negate innocence when that innocence is coded with racism and sexism. Experience transcends rather than confronts, a move that Baldwin sees as leaving poisonous American innocence rather intact.

The conclusion of his essay is a call to arms against this: “Not everything that is faced can be changed: but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.” But even as Baldwin calls for a new literature intent on facing America’s problematic innocence, his approach is not to go around the work of the previous generation of American authors. Instead, he goes through it.
—Nicholas Bredie, “James Baldwin in the Archive,” Ploughshares, March 21, 2023 (originally published August 29, 2019)

May 2024

In celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month, an excerpt from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is currently featured: “For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.”
—Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Penguin Random House, 2020

From the publisher:
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.

June 2024

Opening June 10, 2024

In celebration of Pride Month, an excerpt from José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is currently featured: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain.”
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009

From the publisher (10th anniversary edition, 2019):
Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.