Since February 2022 there have been over 35 Writing Club sessions, both in person at MoMA and online via Zoom, with a wide variety of guest writers, partner organizations, and thematic writing prompts. Here, you will find an archive of some highlights from the past two years of Writing Club, including creative writing prompts developed by established writers in their fields. Please use this page as an educational resource to practice experiencing art through writing.
On Acting Out with River L. Ramirez
River L. Ramirez led this Writing Club, which explored the expressive nature of artworks by Cy Twombly and others in Gallery 405: Acting Out. Inspired by Ramirez’s comedy-writing and performance practice, these prompts experiment with writing as a means of personal, direct gesture. This Writing Club was held in April of 2025.
Warm-up Prompt: What words or mental images come to mind when you think about the phrase “acting out?” Make a list of as many words as you can.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
River L. Ramirez (they/them) is a New York City–based artist originally from Miami. Though they work in the mediums of comedy, film, TV, writing, visual art, and music, it’s easy to forget they are just a little Furby with a knife. Ramirez’s work explores magick, collective consciousness, and liberation through play.
On Latinx Futurity with Robb Hernandez
Robb Hernández facilitated this Writing Club on the theme of “Latinx Futurity,” exploring the powerful artwork Cosmovisión Huitoto by Santiago Yahuarcani. Inspired by themes drawn from Hernández’s current book project, Transplanetary: Speculative Arts of the Americas, these prompts explore how Latinx artists have employed speculative gestures in their work to forge new beginnings, alter endings, or radically redefine how we relate to each other, nature, and the cosmos. This Writing Club was held in January of 2025.
Writing prompt: Many artists who explore Latinx Futurity are imagining an alternative world that rhymes to Western colonial fantasies about lost cities, civilizations, and exotic species. Now let’s consider Santiago Yahuarcani’s Cosmovisión Huitoto (2022). Study the composition. What mappings, gateways, or pathways are forged? Where do they go?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Robb Hernández is a professor of English and director of fashion studies at Fordham University. He is a public advocate for queer and trans artists of color and serves these communities as a curator, oral historian, arts juror, lecturer, and scholarly advisor to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino.
On Embodied Narratives with Antoinette Cooper
Antoinette Cooper facilitated this Writing Club on the theme of “Embodied Narratives: Memory in Motion,” exploring the powerful artworks in Gallery 520: Jacob Lawrence and Christopher Cozier. Drawing inspiration from her forthcoming documentary poetry collection UNRULY (2025), Cooper invited participants to delve into the bodily imprints of migration, displacement, and resilience. This Writing Club was held in December of 2024.
Reflection prompt: Witnessing the Single Step
Choose one figure from Lawrence’s Migration Series and try to mirror their posture while reflecting on the following questions—you may choose to hold these reflections in your heart or write them down.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Antoinette Cooper is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist with over 20 years of experience. Her work focuses on healing collective trauma through the arts, ancestral wisdom, and embodied practices. Antoinette is also the founder of Black Exhale, a nonprofit dedicated to creating sanctuary spaces for the liberated Black body. Her documentary poetry collection, UNRULY, is set to be published in January 2025.
Aimee Meredith Cox on Otobong Nkanga
In collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, ethnographer, writer, dancer, and yogi Aimee Meredith Cox led this Writing Club focusing on Otobong Nkanga’s Atrium installation Cadence in November 2024.
Writing prompt: Even though we are unable to physically put our hands on these objects, can you experience touch through your gaze and with the brilliance of your imagination? As you get close up, let the possibility of touch animate your written response to paying up close attention in this landscape.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club
Aimee Meredith Cox is an anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an associate professor in the anthropology department at New York University, following her appointment as an associate professor in the African American studies and anthropology departments at Yale University.
On Queer Intimacies with Amber Jamilla Musser
In collaboration with CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), Amber Jamilla Musser facilitated a special Pride Month edition of Writing Club, on the theme of queer intimacies, making connections with artworks by Kerry James Marshall and Nari Ward inspired by themes drawn from Musser’s most recent book, Between Shadows and Noise (2024), in July 2024.
Reflection prompt: Let us look closely at this drawing. What is it depicting? What are the senses and feelings in your body that it activates? Experiment with standing farther away or closer, to the right or to the left. Are there specific details that you are drawn to?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Amber Jamilla Musser is professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on queer studies, Black feminisms, and visual culture. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (2024).
David Gissen on What a Body Needs
Author, designer, and educator David Gissen facilitated a writing workshop on what a body needs in para- and post-COVID New York City. In response to the installation Body Constructs, Gissen invited participants to fantasize through discussion and writing prompts on ways that buildings, interiors, and landscapes might better represent our physical capacities, incapacities, and weaknesses.
Writing prompt: Begin by exploring the artworks and reflecting on the question, What does a body need today? Write down a list of things that you think a body needs today. Think about your own body as well as the human body in society.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English)
David Gissen is a New York–based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. His recent book The Architecture of Disability (2023) has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” He is currently a professor of architecture and urban history at the Parsons School of Design/New School University.
Aimee Meredith Cox on Ja’Tovia Gary’s THE GIVERNY SUITE
In collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, ethnographer, writer, dancer, and yogi Aimee Meredith Cox led this Writing Club focusing on Ja’Tovia Gary’s installation THE GIVERNY SUITE in March 2024.
Reflection prompt: What is your relationship to your body? Do you experience your body as a sovereign space? When and where do you feel your own bodily autonomy—that you have control over and the ability to protect your body? When and where does safety, or the lack thereof, become an issue for you as you move through the world?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Aimee Meredith Cox is an anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an associate professor in the anthropology department at New York University, following her appointment as an associate professor in the African American studies and anthropology departments at Yale University.
On the Moon with Serubiri Moses
Independent writer and curator Serubiri Moses facilitated a writing workshop on the theme of “Utilizing the Epistolary Form,” in which participants wrote in response to Leandro Katz’s Lunar Sentence II, in November 2023.
Reflection prompt: If the moon were a character in a novel, what or who would it be? Write five words after this reflection.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as a faculty member in the art history department at Hunter College, and as visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum at Bard College. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry.
On Collecting with Shaka McGlotten
In collaboration with CUNY’s Center for LGTBQ Studies (CLAGS), writer Shaka McGlotten facilitated a writing workshop on the themes of collection and the body, making connections with artworks by Adrian Piper and Kiki Smith, in June 2023.
On collecting: Museums are sites for collection and display. But what is collected and displayed and what is not? Artists Adrian Piper and Kiki Smith both assemble collections that have to do with the body—with what comprises it and what is cast from it.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Shaka McGlotten is a professor of media studies and anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as chair of the gender studies and global Black studies programs. They are the author of Dragging: Or, in the Drag of a Queer Life (2021) and Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (2013). They are also the co-editor of two collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis, 2012) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones, 2014).
On Memory with Sarah Thankam Matthews
In collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, writer Sarah Thankam Matthews facilitated a writing workshop on the theme of memory, focusing on artworks by Lorna Simpson and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, in May 2023.
Writing prompt: Write about a memory of a school lunch. Those are your keywords: school and lunch.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Hindu)
Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, and immigrated to the United States in her late teens. Her work has been published in Best American Short Stories and she received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2020 she founded the mutual-aid group Bed-Stuy Strong. All This Could Be Different, Mathews’s debut novel, was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, was chosen for several best-of-2022 lists, and was shortlisted for the Discover Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the National Book Award.
On Lingering, Loitering, and Whiling Away with Anaïs Duplan
Writer Anaïs Duplan led this Writing Club on lingering, loitering, and whiling away, focusing on an artwork by Noah Davis, in February 2023.
Warm-up prompt: What mental images come to mind when you think of rest?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the books I NEED MUSIC, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, and Take This Stallion, and the chapbook Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at the New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others.
On Sunlight/Moonlight with Alice Sparkly Kat
In collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, writer Alice Sparkly Kat facilitated a writing workshop on sunlight, moonlight, prophesy, and becoming grounded in the I Got Up… series by On Kawara in January 2023.
Warm-up prompt: Write a story of how you got up today.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Spanish)
Alice Sparkly Kat is an astrologer. Their goal is to bring reconstruction and historicism back into astrology and to bring mysticism back into storytelling. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. They are the author of Postcolonial Astrology (2021).
On Wholeness with Kay Ulanday Barrett
In collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, writer Kay Ulanday Barrett facilitated a writing workshop on wholeness and assemblage, grounded in works of art by Alfonso Ossario and Adrian Piper, in December 2022.
Warm-up prompt: What sensations and words do you consider with wholeness? Now think about the word assemblage. How does this word connect to you and your climates/spaces/homes?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and Tagalog)
Named one of the Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know by Vogue magazine, Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper.
On Us with Mimi Zhu
In collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, writer Mimi Zhu facilitated a writing workshop on community and interconnectedness grounded in works of art by Martin Wong, Jenny Hozler, and Lady Pink in December 2022.
Writing prompt: What emotions are evoked for you, in the multi-dimensions of your own identity, when you look at this painting?
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English and simplified Chinese)
Mimi Zhu is a queer Chinese Australian writer and artist. They explore the many intersections of love and fear, and they facilitate workshops that are dedicated to the healing power of the written word. They recently released their first book, Be Not Afraid of Love.
On Traces with Jehan Roberson
In July 2022, writer Jehan Roberson led this Writing Club on traces, marking presence, and marking time by focusing on artworks by Julie Mehretu and LaToya Ruby Frasier.
Warm-up prompt: What words do you associate with traces or tracing? Write down all the words that come to mind.
Download the full list of writing prompts from this Writing Club (English)
Jehan Roberson is a writer, artist, and memory worker who uses text as the basis for her interdisciplinary arts practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Roberson makes work that explores Black, queer textual practices as sites of liberation, place making, and archival intervention.