Responding to the work of Martin Wong, “Speak the Unhearable” is a queer-crip performance ritual by the echo-deviant poet Noa Micaela Fields and alphabet artist Nat Pyper engaging the limits of language at the edge of hearing.

From intentionally misspelled and distorted calligraphy-inspired texts to the American Sign Language fingerspelling scripts he painted above graffiti-covered buildings, Wong treated language as a mutable material across his varied practice—a trickster toeing the line between what is meant and what is understood. Taking these investigations as a point of departure, this performance gossips with ghosts and cruises language’s shifting embodiments.

Like an ethereal game of telephone, Fields’s poems embrace the glitch of mishearing as a portal for transformation, remixing the mouthfeel of found language into her own captionless life. Access mischief ensues when Pyper selectively captions her poetry in the Martin Wong font from their archival typography project A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure.

Meet us in the erogenous zone of the ears for an ill-advised séance of dead letters thrashing in crisscrossed miscommunication, replete with campy wearables, 8-ball fortune-telling, deaf clubbing, and other poetic misadventures.

Martin Wong: Chinatown USA is curated by Yasufumi Nakamori with Ashley Janke, Assistant Curator at Wrightwood 659.

BIOS

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant enjambment queen—translation: trans poet with hearing aids. She is the author of E (Nightboat Books, 2026), an alter-book embracing mishearing as a technology of transformation. Her words have been published in Tripwire, Anomaly, Zoeglossia, Ghost City Press, Sixty Inches From Center, Antiphony, and Foglifter. Beyond the page, her poems take on embodied form in ritual-performance remixes; such ethereal access mischief has transpired at Artists Space, Poetry Project, Elastic Arts, Beyond Baroque, Palais de Tokyo, and No Nation. Born in California, Fields lives in Chicago, where she curates readings at the Poetry Foundation and edits for Chrysalis, a literary magazine by and for trans youth.

Nat Pyper is an alphabet artist. Their practice of performance and publishing extends from ongoing research on countercultural queer histories. They have performed at Performance Space New York, Cooper Cole in Toronto, and PAGEANT in Brooklyn, and published with Are.na, Inga Books, GenderFail, Miniskirt, Source Type, and the Walker Art Center. Their book A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure was published by Inventory Press and Library Stack in 2025. Pyper’s science fiction novella Zurdo..! was published by specific.place in 2026. They are based in South Brooklyn, NY.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Chicago, Lincoln Park, Martin Wong, Nat Pyper, Noa Micaela Fields, Speak the Unhearable