Tammy Nguyen

Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984, San Francisco, CA, based in Easton, CT) is a multimedia artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, and book making. Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007 and a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam in 2008. Since earning her MFA from Yale in 2013, Nguyen has received numerous awards and had work exhibited at MOMA PS1, Smack Mellon, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, and the MOMA Library, among many others. She is a professor at Wesleyan University and represented by Lehmann Maupin. Nguyen’s work features colorful grounds, extreme flatness, metal leaf, and intricate layering. She combines the investigation of geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories with myth and fantasy, producing enchanting visual narratives that blur the lines of fiction and nonfiction. Her lush and heavily researched storytelling provokes thought about truth and confusion in the past, present, and future. In addition to her practice in traditional fine arts, Nguyen is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press. This independent press joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create cross-disciplinary projects that render Nguyen’s storytelling accessible in library collections and mailboxes of readers around the world.