Join your fellow ARLIS/NA New York members for a visit to A Comedy for Mortals: Artists Books of Tammy Nguyen at the Cooper Union Library on Tuesday, August 5, at 4:00 PM.This is the first public exhibition of Nguyen’s latest artist book, Paradise: The Bread of Angels, and the first time the complete trilogy has been shown together.
Nguyen’s work combines sculptural elements with screen-prints, handset type, and hand-made and hand-marbled papers. The Inferno (2023) includes nine books, corresponding to Dante’s nine circles of Hell. Displayed in the Library are three titles from that group: A Welter of Language, Snake in the Grass, and Open Eyes. In Mine, Purgatory (2024), Nguyen combines seven accordion-fold books in a sculptural stack referencing “Mount Purgatory” from Dante’s text. Rising from a reproduction cast of a dinosaur footprint (a reference to Godzilla, created in this period as a metaphor for nuclear catastrophe), these books continue the exploration of Cold War themes such as the environmental damage around the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference.
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 B.F.A. from The Cooper Union in 2007 and a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam in 2008. Since earning her M.F.A. from Yale in 2013, Nguyen has received numerous awards and had her work exhibited at ICA Boston, MOMA PS1, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Sarasota Art Museum, among many others. She serves on the faculty at Wesleyan University and is represented by Lehmann Maupin.
The tour will be capped at 30 participants and registration is limited to members of ARLIS/NA's New York Chapter. We will meet for the visit in the lobby of Cooper Union's Foundation Building.
If you have any questions about the visit, please reach out to Joey Vincennie, Programming Coordinator at vincennie@frick.org.
