• “Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable” has just opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where it can be viewed until September 17, 2023. This exhibition, curated by Jennifer R. Gross, is the first comprehensive presentation of Mina Loy’s visual art: “Over 80 paintings, drawings, and constructions made by Loy through the course of her life, are united to reveal her omnivorous creativity as an image-maker, author, and cultural arbiter. These works, drawn from a dozen institutional and private lenders, are complemented by extensive, never-before assembled, archival materials that will contextualize her art within the arc of her life” (Bowdoin Museum of Art). Princeton University Press has published the exhibition catalog, richly illustrated with images of the art in the exhibition, with essays by Jennifer R. Gross, Dawn Ades, Roger L. Conover, and Ann Lauterbach.
• “‘All about / Unfolding’: Mapping Mina Loy Studies in 2023,” an Online Symposium organized by Dr. Jade French, Jennifer Ashby, and Julia Heinemann, will take place on August 4, 2023. For further information see the symposium website.
• “Mina Loy and Her Networks,” a conference organized by Dr. Yasna Bozhkova, Dr. Diane Drouin, and Dr. Juliette Utard, is scheduled for September 8-9, 2023, at Sorbonne Université & Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. For further information see the conference website.

Inspired by “The Cantos Project” for Pound and the several annotated versions of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “The Annotated ‘Songs to Joannes’” offers students of Mina Loy’s work a gloss of the surgically precise language deployed in her 34-part poem sequence, “Songs to Joannes.” Capable of bewildering even the most careful reader, Loy’s quintessentially Modernist work collages various lexicons (medical, biological, slang, etc.) and referents; these annotations are designed to serve as a tool of entry into the poems, providing definitions contemporary to the Songs’ publication, as well as additional textual information, hyperlinked for easy interaction. “The Annotated ‘Songs to Joannes’” enables fellow “cerebral foragers” of Loy’s work to parse the poems’ careful language as users build their own individual readings and responses.

Jacqueline Kari is a doctoral candidate in contemporary American poetry and international Modernism at the University of Georgia. She is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and currently serves as Assistant to the Editors at The Georgia Review.

In the past year, we’ve been busy not only working on this site, but also writing and talking about it. Our articles and conference papers have helped us clarify our vision and goals, and more importantly, put us in conversation with a broader community of practice in feminist digital humanities and modernist studies.

In Spring 2018 we completed our co-authored essay about the mina-loy.com project, “Digital Baedeker: A Feminist Experiment with Mina Loy’s Archive” for the volume The Contemporary Poetry Archive, edited by Linda Anderson, Mark Byers, and Ahren Warner (Edinburgh UP, July 2019). In addition, we co-authored an essay, “Feminist Designs: Modernist Digital Humanities & Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde,” which was published in Feminist Modernist Studies, in a special issue devoted to Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities (DOI: 10.1080/24692921.2018.1505255).

In November 2018, we showcased mina-loy.com in the Digital Exhibition at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Columbus. Suzanne spoke about the project in a roundtable on “Feminist Designs: Visualizing the Future of Modernist Digital Humanities,” organized by Amanda Golden (New York Institute of Technology) and moderated by Shawna Ross (Texas A&M University). Linda included discussion of the project in her conference presentation, “Light Years With Loy,” as part of a roundtable devoted to long-term critical work with a single woman poet entitled “Taking Our Feminist Time: Years Spent with a Woman Poet,” organized by Linda and Debra Mix (Ball State University).

We also featured the website at the “Mina Loy and Trans-Atlantic Surrealism” panel, organized by Susan, Linda, and fellow Loy scholar Sarah Hayden, author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), at the inaugural SURREALISMS conference sponsored by  the ISSS (International Society for the Study of Surrealism) at Bucknell University, November 1-3, 2018. The panelists discussed Loy’s surrealist artwork, Loy and the surrealist walk, and Loy’s surrealist novel Insel, and were delighted to discover several other presentations at the conference that also featured Mina Loy.

During the fall of 2017, each of us taught a course relevant to mina-loy.com, giving us an opportunity to pilot a cross-institutional digital humanities project with students and enhancing our collaboration with the digital librarians (Emily McGinn, UGA; Sundi Richard, Davidson; Gesina Phillips, Duquesne) and research librarians (Kristin Nielsen, UGA; James Sponsel, Davidson; Gesina Phillips, Duquesne) at our respective schools. The “Biography Project,” as it came to be called, involved students at Davidson, Duquesne, and UGA in researching and writing short biographies of figures associated with the historical avant-garde (chiefly Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) who were connected to Loy in Florence, New York, and Paris. In fall 2018, Linda and Susan resumed the cross-institutional project with students in their graduate seminars on modernism and the avant-garde.

Bio Project Assignment

A truly collaborative effort, we established and followed a shared template for the biographies and involved students in peer-reviews of at least two biographies authored by students from other schools. Students worked with research librarians to find relevant sources and to create annotated bibliographies of their sources. In workshops conducted by digital librarians at each school, students considered the technical and conceptual particularities of gathering and “cleaning” data, writing for a digital platform, and conducting peer review through the open platform hypothes.is.

The biographies were structured on a template that briefly summarizes each figure’s career and their relationship to Loy, along with a number of categories (birth, death, country of origin/citizenship, kind of artistic/cultural worker, dates and places of overlap with Loy) chosen with a digital humanities project in mind. Once the students had completed the research and writing of their figure’s biography, they learned how to enter information from the biography template into a Google spread sheet using a Data Dictionary (created by Dr. Emily McGinn, Director, UGA DigiLab).

An exciting outcome of this collection of data was the creation of visualizations of Loy’s social-artistic networks in Florence, New York and Paris (with the help of our wonderful digital librarians). Emily McGinn and Caleb Crumley created a preliminary visualization of this data for mina-loy.com using cytoscape (the final visualization and explanation of how to interpret it is now available under “Maps”):

Once the biographies were completed for class, three graduate students at Duquesne (John Hadlock, English PHD; Rochel Gasson, English PHD; Taylor Maldonado, English MA) undertook final editing and uploading of each figure’s biography to the website’s “Bios” page. Additional biographies are in the works and will be completed and uploaded in Summer 2019.

I attended the “Elizabeth Bishop in Paris” conference in June 2018 (#EBParis), and arrived a couple of days early to find and photograph some of the places where Loy lived, worked, and socialized for the chapter on Mina Loy and Parisian Surrealism for mina-loy.com. In the midst of wonderful papers on Bishop, however, my mind kept returning to Mina Loy… or rather, thinking about Bishop in Paris made me think differently about Loy in Paris. And a key point of connection was Gertrude Stein. My paper explored Bishop’s navigation of literary Paris during her two trips there (July 1935-February 1936, June-December 1937). Bishop was very interested in Stein at this time and attended her lecture on “entity versus identity” in Paris; prior to traveling to Paris, Bishop  had heard Stein deliver two lectures on her Fall 1934 American tour: “Pictures” at the Colony Club in New York and “Portraits I have Written and What I think of Repetition, Whether it Exists or No” at Vassar College. Bishop wrote insightfully about Stein’s experimental style, as did Marianne Moore and Mina Loy; in fact, all three poets defined the importance of “experiment” (and used that word) in the context of Stein’s writing. Loy’s admiration for Stein and her writing is well-known: Loy called Stein the “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary” in a poem that opened her two-part essay on Stein’s work in TransAtlantic Review (Sept and Oct 1924) and delivered a paper on Stein at Natalie Barney’s salon in 1927, later published by Barney in Aventures de  l’Esprit (1929).

Since Stein was a model of experiment for both Bishop and Loy, I wondered whether Loy and Bishop had crossed paths in Paris during Bishop’s 1935-6 trip.  It’s certainly possible, although unlikely, as neither writer mentions this connection. In fact, even as Bishop explored key locations of avant-garde and expatriate Paris also frequented by Loy —  Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop, André Breton’s art gallery, Les Deux Magots, the Café de Flore — she confessed to being too shy to accept social invitations (including tea at Gertrude Stein’s), or to talk with the writers and artists she encountered. While Loy remained on the margins of avant-garde movements, she was an active presence in expatriate and avant-garde circles; Bishop remained truly outside these circles even as she studied and absorbed their literary and artistic experiments. Bishop and Loy demonstrate quite different negotiations of the “en dehors garde,” and this may help to explain why Bishop is usually left out of histories of experimental writing. Through the Bishop conference I learned that Dr. Amy Waite is working on a book about Loy and Bishop, Our Earthly Trust: Mina Loy, Elizabeth Bishop and the Posthuman, in which she explores how their poetry encourages and theorizes radical encounters between the human and non-human.

The temporal overlap of Bishop and Loy in Paris with no evidence of their meeting reminded me of the many unconfirmed yet theoretically possible connections between Mina Loy and the writers, artists, and musicians who visited Paris in the 1920s and early 30s. My students working on Loy’s social and artistic connections in Paris wondered about these unconfirmed, yet possible, connections: for instance, did Loy and Langston Hughes cross paths while both were in Paris in 1923/24? Archival research may turn up more information about Loy’s network in Paris, but also telling are the connections that were not recorded or that didn’t occur, a kind of shadow-map shaped by geographies of race, class, social affiliation, chance. How might our literary histories (and network visualizations) account for these shadow-maps?

I tracked down the building that housed Loy’s lamp shop at 52 Rue de Colisėe, a street that connects the Avenue des Champs Elysées with Rue de Faubourg St Honoré on the right bank. Loy created original lamp designs for the shop, oversaw their production, and managed the shop from 1926-29 (she bought it from Peggy Guggenheim with the help of Edgar Levy in 1928 and sold it in March 1930). The location is currently a restaurant serving a variety of Asian dishes.  

I was excited to learn that a number of French scholars and students are writing about Mina Loy, and came across Olivier Apert’s recent translation of Loy’s poems (Nous, 2017); Apert has also translated Loy’s “Manifeste Feministe & Écrits Modernistes” (2014).