Location: Easton, CT
Medium: Painting, Printmaking
Website: tammynguyenstudio.com
Tammy Nguyen was born in San Francisco, California, in 1984, where she was born and raised before moving east for her studies. She earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007, then received a Fulbright Scholarship the following year to study lacquer painting in Vietnam. She went on to earn an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University in 2013.
Nguyen now lives and works in Easton, Connecticut, where she is an assistant professor of art at Wesleyan University. She is also the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent imprint that produces artist books and the subscription series Martha’s Quarterly. In 2023 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and her other honors include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2024), a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting (2021), and a Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts from the Center for Book Arts (2014).
Since completing her MFA, Nguyen’s work has been shown widely, including at MoMA PS1 (Greater New York 2021), the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), and her first U.S. solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2023). She is represented by Lehmann Maupin, with solo presentations in New York, Seoul, and London, and her recent institutional exhibitions include the Sarasota Art Museum (2024), the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst (2025–26), and the Blanton Museum of Art (2026). In 2026 her work was included in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys.
Nguyen is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, drawing, and bookmaking, often combining watercolor, ink, pastel, and gold or metal leaf on paper. Her densely layered, jewel-toned compositions merge historical documents, botanical and zoological imagery, and literary references — from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Ellsberg Papers — into intricate visual narratives that examine geopolitics, ecology, and the lesser-known histories behind grand ambitions.
Recurring motifs — Fibonacci spirals, luna moths, eagles, wild roses — appear across her series, which frequently take the form of extended bodies of work spanning paintings, prints, and handmade artist books published through her own imprint, Passenger Pigeon Press. This cross-format approach lets her build sustained, book-like narratives around a single historical or mythic thread, treating each exhibition as a chapter in a larger, ongoing inquiry into power, faith, and the natural world.
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