Cosponsored by by UIS Visual Arts Gallery
Artist, Huong Ngo, will present a visual lecture that explores her identity as a refugee in the American South and examine the challenges of being “othered” within a community. She will discuss these topics through the lens of her interdisciplinary artistic practice. Ngo will show examples from multiple bodies of work, including both visual art and performance, to articulate her perspectives. She will explore issues of colonialism, immigration, citizenship, intersectionality, marginalization, and resistance in her lecture – as she does in her art practice.
Huong Ngo is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice connects the personal and the political, giving material form to histories which have been rendered invisible and interrogating the ideological origins of their erasure. Her work is largely influenced by her past growing up as a refugee in the American South. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001), an MFA in Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2012). She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for her research that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. She is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This lecture will coincide with an exhibition and reception of Huong Ngo’s work in the UIS Visual Arts Gallery that will emphasize a survey of her practice in support of the lecture content.
