Manon Wada

video still of Manon tracing writing on a window

In her art practice Manon often excavates narratives of collective hungry ghosts, contemporary displacement, and translation of what is found through loss. The constellation of her work tends to land on a timeline that investigates combinations of rupture, repair, and empathy. Inherited furniture and found objects are a significant and reoccurring source of material in her work. Her art practice takes form as sculpture, video, and site responsive installation, which frequently intersects with poetry. In tandem, she often works collaboratively and on socially engaged, community based art projects.

Manon Wada is an artist originally from and currently based in New York City on Canarsie Munsee Lenape land, and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area on Ohlone Ramaytush Muwekma land for many years in between. She has worked in education for over a decade as a Teaching Artist, Registered Behavior Technician in Applied Behavior Analysis therapy, and presently as a Professor in Scultpure. Currently she also works as a Building Surveyor for an architectural drafting company.

She completed her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in Sculpture and BFA at California College of the Arts in Community Arts. Manon has been awarded grants for projects entitled Visible Voices, HEARTH Community Art Garden Project, and Counternarratives of Herstory Census. She is a member of Asian American Women Artists Association and has been an artist-in-residence at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC, ComPeung in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and A Place of Her Own in San Francisco, CA.

Her work has been exhibited at The Emily Harvey Foundation, Grace Exhibition Space, Loisaida Inc, Border Project Space, and Buffalo Riverworks in NY, HUB-Robeson Galleries at Penn State University, PA, at the Whitney Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, MA, Sol Koffler Gallery and RISD Museum Gelman Gallery in Providence, RI, Rumpueng Community Art Space and Weave Artisan Society in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and San Francisco Bay Area venues including SOMArts Cultural Center, Edge on the Square, Thoreau Center for Sustainability, International Hotel Manilatown Center, Hunters Point Shipyard Studios, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art.

contact: wadamanon (at) gmail (dot) com