[Brooklyn, NY]

Original Print Works from O by Tammy Nguyen
December 3, 2022,
at Central Library, Brookyln Public Library

Over 50 original works on paper by Tammy Nguyen will be exhibited at the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch in conjunction with the publication of her new book. In O, Nguyen’s richly-layered drawings are interwoven with the text, creating a genre-defying work that is as much a visual undertaking as it is a literary one.

About the book: From a dentist’s office in San Francisco to the caves of the Phong Nha Karst, Tammy Nguyen’s O sounds the depths of personal, mineral, and geopolitical histories of Vietnam. In this many-threaded narrative, a wind that carved mountains whistles through a young girl’s teeth. The electric green of a plastic forest glints off of glazed porcelain. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. What emerges is a story without a center: an anti-allegory that finds its meaning in echoes and refracted light, a book stitched together by the O woven through the work as its visual spine and sonic refrain.

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Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. In 2008, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014 and a NYFA Fellowship in painting in 2021. Recently her work was included in Greater New York 2021 at MOMA PS1 and has also exhibited at Nichido Contemporary Art in Japan, Smack Mellon, Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others. She is represented by Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul, London.