Meesha GoldbergMeesha Goldberg Artwork

Available Books

The Seed Is Waiting in the Dark

Chapbook now available through Finishing Line Press!

The Seed is Waiting in the Dark confronts the realities of ecological catastrophe and diasporic displacement with the lyric intensity of a life lived reckoning with questions of collective survival. Included within this debut collection are five of Goldberg’s paintings, which poignantly illustrate these feral, visionary poems. Full of grief, grace, and lessons from the land, The Seed is Waiting in the Dark conjures ancestral instincts to claim belonging within the cycles of natural life.

“This collection of powerful invocations is a profound inquiry into the beautiful and painful holding of lineages, languages, names, and wounds in a corporeal body. In the lineage of haunted texts like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, this text feels channeled, unafraid of the clarity that deep grief brings, declaring unabashedly, “Death was kin.” These poems resonate with mentions of the gut, notably, “How can you gut your Mother’s lungs?” and I think about the significance of gut feelings, the concept of Korean han 한 held in the gut, and also gut 굿, the cleansing rites performed by Korean shamans. Goldberg writes, “If women’s tears / are healing rain / there must be grief enough / for our vision to return.” This book is a gift, a ritual, a revelation.”

–Janice Lee, Author of Imagine a Death and Separation Anxiety

Budoji

Illustrations for the book “Budoji: A Tale of the Divine City of Ancient Korea.” order here

"Budoji: A Tale of the Divine City of Ancient Korea", written by Jesang Park (363-419 CE), was a chapter in a larger collection of writings called Jing Shim Rok. It was passed down through his family over the generations and reintroduced to the world in 1953 by one of his descendants. "Budoji" contains the culture and early beliefs of Ancient Joseon, including stories about the creation of the world and the early mythological history of the Korean people. The word Budo refers to both a capital city and to a nation that acts in accordance with the Divine. Together it means that the will of the Divine is fulfilled on Earth. This is the founding principle on which ancient Joseon, GoJoseon, the kingdom of Dangun, was built upon.

Many different versions of "Budoji" have been published in Korean with myriad commentaries from a historical or spiritual perspective. This edition from Alpha Sisters Publishing includes commentaries from Professor Sungje Cho, pre-eminent scholar of Korean Shamanism.

Empire Is Over

Empire Is Over is an experimental creative expedition through the treacherous ideological terrain of the 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery journey, taken over five months as resident artist at New City Arts. The journey of these two sons of Albemarle County has been naively and dangerously decontextualized from its settler colonial mission and Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” whose imperial reach now overextends through 800+ military installations worldwide. This multimedia exhibit reckons with these ghosts of Charlottesville, deconstructing the historical record to invoke transformational mythologies.

Raised Up & All Embraced was a two-hour long hug performed atop the stone plinth of the former monument on November 18th, 2023, by Aidyn Mancenido, Cheryl Robinson, and myself, photographed by Kristen Finn. The 1919 Charles Keck monument, which depicted the Shoshone teenager, Sacajawea, in a demeaning stance below Lewis and Clark, was removed in 2021 along with Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments. The Lewis & Clark Journal cut ups are presented in the exhibition collaged onto white pencil drawings on stained paper sewn, printed, and burnt into, illustrating our potential to edit collective understanding of the past, and imagine empire as over.

The “cut up” technique is an artistic method pioneered by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, in which subconscious voices may be unleashed in previously published writings or artworks through the cutting up and rearrangement of lines of text or image, breaking the stranglehold of linear narrative control. I used this technique on both The Lewis and Clark Journals and Their First View of the Pacific, the former Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea monument, in search of a multiplicity of truths. By cutting in with the editorial critique of my Korean Diasporic consciousness, I claim entanglement with this difficult history, while broadening the lens with which we can look at its reverberations. The United States expanded so far west from Monticello along the 38th parallel, it cut my motherland in two along the DMZ.

The Empire Is Over exhibit, was on display at New City Art’s Welcome Gallery, Charlottesville, VA, from February 2-22nd, 2024. On opening night, a performance took place where the United States was evicted, a tree enshrined, and a cake cut cut and served with a machete. Upon the closing of the show, a symposium Visionary Remembering was held featuring descendants of Sacajawea and preeminent local female leaders, scholars, and artists.

Nuclear Spring

“Nuclear Spring", 5/20/23, The Code Building, Chalk Fest, Charlottesville, VA

As G7 world leaders cynically met in Hiroshima to affirm forever war, we concocted the medicine of the ASIAN FEMME PROPHETIC VIBRATION. Live from the idyll of downtown Charlottesville, VA, in Thomas Jefferson's waning "Empire of Liberty", we presented the repressed spectre of nuclear cataclysm. Descended from the mountain, the river, the women, we the feral, sight the red sky.

performance by Meesha Goldberg & Aidyn Mancenido

photography by Kristen Finn

NUCLEAR SPRING

Daughterland

A 2022 exhibit at Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA featuring an installation of the short experimental film “Daughterland”, ritual artifacts from the film, and a series of ceremonial dress paintings.

“‘Daughterland’ experiments with how one can create spiritual kinship with the Earth despite dislocation from the waters and cultures of a motherland. Born of a Korean mother who married an occupying American soldier, Goldberg rejects nationalism and declares her body the Daughterland, a sacred site from where to deepen relationships with the sources of life. The resulting artworks are an exploration of ancestral consciousness, activated through a life in nature, the reclamation of diasporic shamanic culture, and research into family and transnational histories. Goldberg uses film, performance, painting, and poetry to ritually process the grief of a multiplicity of matrilineal wounds and express a nuanced land ethic of belonging.

“Daughterland” the film charts a land ethic of the Korean American Diaspora, in which artist Meesha Goldberg walks for thirteen hours encircling an ancient oak tree while costumed in her mother's diary. The film seeks to transmute spiritual dislocation from a mother/motherland through the honoring of the land, the integration of histories, and the reclamation of creative ritual arts. By Meesha Goldberg and Michael Jones.”

DAUGHTERLAND(2022)

Equilibrium Rites

Equilibrium Rites was a 100 mile walk and performance art ritual that took place February 16-21, 2016. It was performed for the 80 BILLION honeybees that are trucked in from around the country every year to pollinate the 1 million acre California almond monoculture. Harmful migration management practices such as exposure to pesticides, fungicides, long travel, poor diet, and cross contamination of mites and disease between hives have all contributed to the devastating hive loses we've seen this century. Along the walk we sang, drummed, prayed, documented, and learned from the farmers and beekeepers we encountered on the roadside. Through our journey we sought to both bear witness and reimagine agriculture as sacred.

The project culminated in a solo show of paintings inspired by the walk at The Hive Gallery, Los Angeles, and a co-curated group show entitled Honey & Venom, which took place in August 2016 as the almonds were harvested.

Photography by James Stark, Giulia D'Agostino, Ryan Kittleson.

Artists include Joanna Brook, Patricia Algara, Kaylee Holz, Giulia D'Agostino, & Elizabeth Shupe.