Tammy Nguyen

Born in San Francisco in 1984, Tammy Nguyen earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The following year, she received a Fulbright grant to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she worked with a ceramics company for three years. In 2013, she completed an MFA at Yale and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014, followed by a NYFA Fellowship in 2021. She currently lives and works in Connecticut.

Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, drawing, artist books, prints, and zines, exploring complex themes such as geopolitics, ecology, and marginalized histories. Her practice is twofold: producing works of art and running her editorial project, Passenger Pigeon Press, through which she publishes a series of artist books. Her style is marked by a vibrant and energetic palette, creating a dynamic surface that conceals socially and politically charged narratives.

Central to her work are themes such as the Bandung Conference, the historic Afro-Asian meeting during the Cold War, and Forest City, an urban development project in Malaysia. Nguyen has also explored the plight of the endangered red-shanked douc langur, a monkey species under threat. The collection includes her piece Where is the world? from 2022.

Her works are layered with socio-political references and ecological awareness, giving her canvases a chaotic yet thought-provoking quality. Nguyen highlights the underlying interconnectedness of all these themes, using her figurative approach to overlap images, leaving the observer to piece together the narrative and interpret the subjects through their own imagination.