Antoinette Cooper facilitates this month’s Writing Club, “Embodied Narratives: Memory in Motion,” exploring the powerful artworks in Gallery 520: Jacob Lawrence and Christopher Cozier. Drawing inspiration from her forthcoming documentary poetry collection UNRULY (2025), Cooper invites participants to delve into the bodily imprints of migration, displacement, and resilience. Through embodied writing and reflection, this session will investigate how memory moves through us, shaping our understanding of self, lineage, and community across time and place. The goal is to uncover how personal, ancestral, and collective memories are held within us and expressed through art. This session will take place online via Zoom, as we navigate relationships across time and space.
This Writing Club is an opportunity to build community among people invested in trauma-informed practices, narrative liberation, communal healing, and creating sanctuary. The same session will be offered twice, once in MoMA’s galleries and once online via Zoom.
Registration
Register for Writing Club at Home on Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Antoinette Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist with over 20 years of experience. Her work focuses on healing collective trauma through the arts, ancestral wisdom, and embodied practices. Antoinette is also the founder of Black Exhale, a nonprofit dedicated to creating sanctuary spaces for the liberated Black body. Her documentary poetry collection, UNRULY, is set to be published in January 2025. A sought-after speaker and facilitator, Cooper has presented at numerous conferences and institutions, including TEDx, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Poetry Foundation. Her writing has been featured in the Amistad Literary Arts Journal, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing. Cooper holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and a BA from Cornell University. She has completed extensive training in contemplative practices, trauma-informed leadership, and narrative medicine. Cooper serves on the advisory board for the Narrative Medicine Track of Distinction at CUNY School of Medicine and has taught at various institutions, including Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Rikers Island jail facility. Recognized for her contributions to the arts and social justice, Cooper is a recipient of the Twenty Summers Residency, BLKSPACE Residency, a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and funding from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, LMCC.
About Writing Club
Writing Club, an ongoing program at MoMA, is part of the Museum’s Artful Practices for Well-Being initiative, which offers ideas for connectedness and healing through art. At each Writing Club, a guest writer introduces different works of art and offers a series of creative prompts. The intention is to offer a calm, supportive, and welcoming environment for anyone interested in generating new writing in the company of visual art and a fellowship of writers.
Accessibility
CART captioning and American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
The Adobe Foundation is proud to support equity, learning, and creativity at MoMA.
Access and community programs at MoMA are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Major funding is provided by the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.