Katie Mongoven: Envision 2025 Finalist
Katie Mongoven’s (BFA ’17) process-based fiber work examines evolving, intersecting themes of identity, fragility, and autonomy through cotton, hair, and beads.
Informed by scholar Anne Anling Cheng’s feminist theory on ornamentalism — namely, that clothing and ornamentation worn by Asian women signify race and identity the same as their skin color — Mongoven’s work connects to her own past and present relationship with bodily autonomy.
“As an orphan and adoptee during China’s One-Child Policy, my first interactions with bodily autonomy began during this government-driven, family planning policy that invaded homes, families, and bodies,” she says. “Today, as I consider my family planning, the failure of this violating policy serves as a lesson about the dangers of government interference in personal choices.”
Starting with purchased (or “adopted”) Ming-style Chinese bud vases — vessels for a single flower — decorated in familiar blue glaze, Mongoven reclaims them with sewn cotton and her own hair to bind glass beads to them, distorting the the original Orientalist patterns and “creating a second, protective skin.”
“Cotton is a major export of the city where I was born and abandoned, while my hair represents fertility and DNA,” she says. “These vases become extensions of myself in both form and function, drawing comparisons to the body as a vessel for creating life, their racialized surface, and their repurposed life after being put up for sale.”
After earning her BFA from Stamps, Mongoven pursued her MFA in fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded the Surface Design Association’s Outstanding Student Award. She has been a Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist at U‑M, a Windgate University Fellow at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, and the 2024 Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University. She has also attended residencies at the California Institute of the Arts, U‑M, and Vermont Studio Center, and will attend Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, later this year.
As an emerging artist based in Detroit, Mongoven appreciates opportunities like Envision to not only spotlight her own work, but other Michigan artists as well.
“People always say that you can only have an arts career if you’re in one of the big cities, but the fact that this opportunity exists makes it more accessible for a whole range of artists who don’t live in those areas,” she says.
Envision: The 2025 Michigan Artists Initiative, featuring works by finalists Conor Fagan, Katie Mongoven, and Sara Nickleson, is on view at Stamps Gallery in downtown Ann Arbor through August 2, 2025.
Join us on July 16 for Envision 2025 Conversations, an insightful panel discussion with the artists and a panel of regional art curators and leaders, including Grand Rapids Art Museum Director and CEO Cindy Meyers Foley, and Director of Kresge Arts in Detroit Katie Grace McGowan.