Tammy Nguyen

Tammy Nguyen (born 1984) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes painting, printmaking, drawing, and bookmaking.[1] Nguyen was raised in San Francisco, California, and now lives and works in Easton, Connecticut with her husband and family.[2] Alongside her fine arts practice, Nguyen is the founder of the imprint Passenger Pigeon Press, and serves as an assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University.[3]

Early life and education

Nguyen received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2007, before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam the following year.[4] She remained in Vietnam for four years, during which she served as an assistant to artists such as Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and later worked for a ceramic tile company.[5]

In 2011, Nguyen returned to the United States to study at Yale University, where she received her MFA in painting and printmaking in 2013. While at Yale, she explored her interests in biology and anthropology, eventually volunteering at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, where she learned taxidermy and helped skin birds for the William Robertson Coe Ornithology Library.[6]

Work and career

Nguyen’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with archives, geopolitics, lesser-known histories, fiction, myth, and visual narrative.[7] For her paintings, she works in the style of East Asian traditions, using water-based materials on paper.[8] She incorporates mediums such as watercolor, Flashe, ink, pastel, gilding, and hot stamping into her layering process.[9]

2022 marked a landmark year for Nguyen. Her work was featured in the twelfth installment of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, curated by Algerian-French artist Kader Attia.[10] Lehmann Maupin gallery announced their representation of Nguyen that same year.[11]

Her debut presentation with Lehmann Maupin was a three-part exhibition series exploring Nguyen’s reading of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, titled A Comedy for Mortals. The first exhibition, Inferno, was presented at the gallery’s Seoul location, while the second, Purgatorio, was held in London. The final installment of the series, Paradiso, was exhibited at Lehmann Maupin’s New York gallery.[12] Inferno and Purgatorio served as Nguyen’s solo debut in Korea and the United Kingdom, respectively.[13][14]

Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2023. The eponymous exhibition centers around the artist’s investigations into American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings on transcendentalism and nature are juxtaposed with Vietnamese history.[15] Her work has been exhibited in many university museums and libraries since, including the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design in 2024, and the University Museum of Contemporary Art at University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2025.[16][17] An exhibition of her artist book series, A Comedy for Mortals, was held by her alma mater at the Cooper Union Library.[18]

Passenger Pigeon Press currently operates out of Nguyen’s studio. Alongside producing collaborations with artists and thinkers, the independent press publishes artist books and distributes them through the subscription service Martha’s Quarterly, named after Martha, the last known passenger pigeon who died in 1914.[19]

Awards and recognition

In 2023, Nguyen was named as a Guggenheim Fellow.[20] Other honors and distinctions include the Herb Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize in Visual Arts in 2024; the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2021, awarded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA); and the Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts from The Center for Book Arts in 2024.[21][22][23] Additionally, Nguyen served as a Pacific Delegate for the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs’s Asia Dialogues program in 2017.[24]

Collections

Nguyen’s work is included in the permanent collections of:

References

  1. ^ "Tammy Nguyen - Sarasota Art Museum". Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  2. ^ "Tammy Nguyen – Sàn Art". Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  3. ^ Apollo (2024-04-02). "Tammy Nguyen". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  4. ^ "Tammy Nguyen". Center for Book Arts. 2020-12-28. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  5. ^ "Tammy Nguyen, Maximalist at Play". 2023-12-13. Archived from the original on 2024-06-02. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  6. ^ "Client Challenge". hyperallergic.com. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  7. ^ "Tammy Nguyen". Center for Book Arts. 2020-12-28. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  8. ^ Apollo (2024-04-02). "Tammy Nguyen". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  9. ^ "Canvases of Camouflage: In conversation with Tammy Nguyen". Boston Art Review. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  10. ^ "About". 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  11. ^ "Announcing Representation of Tammy Nguyen - - News - Lehmann Maupin". www.lehmannmaupin.com. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  12. ^ Carollo, Elisa (2025-07-28). "Tammy Nguyen's Layered Cosmology Collapses History Into Myth and Meaning". Observer. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  13. ^ Bhargava, Aaina. "Artist Tammy Nguyen tackles heaven, hell and history in her chaotic paintings". Tatler Asia. Archived from the original on 2024-01-17. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  14. ^ "Exhibition | Tammy Nguyen, 'A Comedy For Mortals: Purgatorio' at Lehmann Maupin, London, United Kingdom". ocula.com. 2025-12-11. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  15. ^ "In Painter Tammy Nguyen's Tropical Tableaux, Emersonian Transcendentalism and Modern Vietnamese History Synthesize to Stirring Effect". Artnet News. 2023-09-21. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  16. ^ "Tammy Nguyen - Sarasota Art Museum". Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  17. ^ "The Political Uses of Madness : Fine Arts Center : UMass Amherst". arts.umass.edu. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  18. ^ "Library News - The Cooper Union Library at The Cooper Union Library". library.cooper.edu. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  19. ^ "Artist Tammy Nguyen's New Show Finds Heaven on Earth". W Magazine. 2025-06-06. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  20. ^ "Guggenheim Fellowships: Supporting Artists, Scholars, & Scientists". www.gf.org. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  21. ^ "Residency Prizes | The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts". herbalpertawards.org. 2013-03-26. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  22. ^ Aronoff, Amy (2021-07-13). "Introducing | 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows, Finalists, and Panelists". Nyfa. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  23. ^ "Tammy Nguyen - Artists - Lehmann Maupin". www.lehmannmaupin.com. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  24. ^ "Pacific Delegates (2017)". www.carnegiecouncil.org. Retrieved 2025-12-11.
  25. ^ Nguyen, Tammy (2023), Ralph Waldo Emerson, retrieved 2025-12-11
  26. ^ collections.mfa.org https://collections.mfa.org/objects/708095/ngo-dinh-diem?ctx=1962dd57-b6bb-4830-a1bf-8789461ee27d&idx=0. Retrieved 2025-12-11. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  27. ^ Nguyen, Tammy; Nguyen, Tammy (2019). Atomic sublime: the atom, the sublime, and the American Southwest. Passenger Pigeon Press, Bombshelltoe Policy and Arts Collective, Henry L. Stimson Center, Reinventing Civil Defense Project. Flushing, NY: Tammy Nguyen : Passenger Pigeon Press. OCLC 1127053887.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
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