The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art

The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna), a newly opened one-of-a-kind online museum born out of the pandemic and specifically designed for the digital age, will launch their first online Biennial show on Friday, April 30, 2021 at https://www.mowna.org/. The show will run until September 22, 2021. 

The 2021 mowna Online Biennial is an exhibit of an international pool of artists selected from 44 countries gathered through a call for submissions process that ran from January through March of 2021. mowna's largest show to date, the Biennial includes all forms of art made from 2019 to 2021, inviting artists to consider new ways to exhibit their work online and how their artworks translate best through mowna's digital platform.

Featured works include "The Lockdown", a VR sonic memory installation by Mana Saei, "Planes of resistance" an empathy experiment to explore the world from the vantage point of a black woman using autobiographical acrylic compositions and sound by Linda Rebeiz, a Lebanese-Senegalese artist living in Accra, Ghana, "ERRANDS", a portrait series documenting our shared shelter-in-place experiences by Zachary Handler of Baltimore, Maryland who will perform 3 slots of portraits per week for the month of May to museum guests, first come, first serve. "Susan" is an interactive augmented/virtual reality and video sculpture web experience by Sue Roh, a Brooklyn based Korean American multimedia artist navigating the IRL and URL. "Black Man in America" is a film by Vance Brown and Justina Kamiel Grayman from New York, NY. An interactive new-media installation, "AuxeticBreath", visualizes the rhythmic respiratory rate, as well as tidal volume of collective human breaths using soft robotics covered with auxetic structures by Hyejun Youn of Salzburg, Austria. "PETSCII leaks" by ailadi, an Italian artist whose works have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, are a series of ASCII inspired gif comics. A series of experimental music videos from the opera "The Magic Hummingbird" by Joseph Martin Waters from San Diego, CA will also be shown.

To kick off the Biennial with opening night festivities, mowna will host a special screening of the feature doc "The Faithful: The King, The Pope, The Princess," by Annie Berman on April 30th at 9 PM ET. It will be followed by q&a, the mowna party room, and a first look entrance to the Biennial.

"There's nowhere else that you can see this collection of art, in this way. There are hours of artwork to explore, play with, and listen to, twenty four hours a day.  It is an intimate experience, that you can have alone or with someone, with no crowds to navigate, no distractions, nothing in the way of you and the art," says wild artist cari ann shim sham* who co-founded the museum along with artist Joey Zaza. "As large institutions cancel shows, the art that is being made now potentially will not be seen and might be lost, or perhaps considered irrelevant by a show that is scheduled as far off as 2022. We decided to throw our own Biennial and support artists now," says Zaza.

mowna is a new online platform for art, made by artists for artists. Co-founders cari ann shim sham* and Joey Zaza started the utopian project on October 13th 2020 and launched the museum site with mowna's opening show on January 8th, 2021. Recent events include an online avant premiere for the film Mudwater, about a crew of turfers, a form of street dance from the Bay area of San Francisco, directed by My-Linh Le; paired with the Freedom Musicvideo directed by Lisa Bonet, created by a predominantly feminine cast and crew. mowna hosted a private screening event for UC Riverside Dance Department's undergrad senior capstone projects, offering a live community viewing experience in a time of remote learning. A secret party for members followed the opening show in January hosted by the co-founders and some of the featured artists. 

April 30th will also launch the museum's collection and store. Not only exhibiting current works, mowna is also offering all of their previous shows in a collection that is available for members only. The opening show that closes on April 29th, will move into the collection and be viewable there. A store will open to allow a curated group ofmowna's artists to sell selected one of a kind artworks including NFTs and receive 70%, a higher split than what galleries and other museums offer.  

About mowna

mowna seeks to create an ever changing, fun, thoughtful, beautifully designed space to encourage awareness and mindfulness through the exhibition and experience of art and serves the public's need for art for the highest good of all. By addressing the current needs of not only the artist but also the audience, mowna is breaking barriers within the global art community.

mowna offers the preservation of artworks through an online collection that is an educational resource and archive for its members and its artists, and aims to find, display, and support wild and newfangled art through the incorporation of innovative new technologies and mediums. mowna provides artists with financial compensation for their art and expands awareness of their talents via a sustainable platform where they can flourish.

Click here to experience mowna, the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art