ANH-THUY NGUYEN

As a Vietnamese-American female artist, Anh-Thuy Nguyen’s primary artistic source material for the last decade has been an exploration into her history and experiences as an immigrant. Through her artmaking, using photography and extended media, Nguyen investigates cultural differences and personal politics through the use of symbolic meanings, that imbedded with her home, family, and traditions.

Nguyen has received grants and fellowships from the Arizona Commissions for the Arts, Art Foundations for Tucson and Southern Arizona, Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, and the Oklahoma Center for Humanities at the University of Tulsa. She has exhibited work at Tucson Museum of Art, Amarillo Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, Dallas Museum of Art, and Chiang Mai University Art Museum among others. In 2023, Nguyen received the Second Sight Award from Medium Photo and the Night Bloom grant from the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art for her upcoming project “vietNAIL.” The chapter she co-authored “A is for Alphabet: Reimaging Language and Mastery As A Creative Meandering” was published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group in the book titled “The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft, and Visual Culture Education”, which discussed the theoretical approaches of her multi-disciplinary project “A is for Alphabet”.

Nguyen received her MFA in Photography/Video from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. She holds a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and a BA in Economic Geography from the University of Social Sciences & Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. She splits her time between Tucson, Arizona and Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.

BENJAMIN HICKEY

Benjamin M. Hickey is the curator of exhibitions and Emily Cyr Bridges endowed professor of art at the Hilliard Art Museum on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is also the interim director. Most central to his curatorial practice are projects that blend social history, sense of place, and interdisciplinary collaborations. With over one hundred exhibition credits, artists he has worked with include Brian Kelly of the Marais Press, Letitia Huckaby, L. Kasimu Harris, Robert C. Tannen, Richard Landry, Pat Phillips, Beili Liu, Sonya Clark, Hasan Elahi, and James Surls.

Hickey’s most recent writing can be found in Envisioning the South: The Roger Houston Ogden Collection (Hilliard Art Museum), Cloudburst: The Work of Matt Kenyon (Baton Rouge Gallery, Louisiana State University School of Art, 2022), Twenty Years of Marais Press: Imprinting a Campus and a Collection (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2022), and Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Race, Class & Economics in Rochester, NY (CEPA Gallery, Booksmart, 2021).

In 2023 Hickey received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Grant to co-present research related to the Marais Press and on-campus collaboration at the 51st Annual Art Libraries Society of North America in Mexico City. Earlier in his career, he presented Reshaping Our Programming: The Artist in Residence Program at the New York Historical Society in conjunction with the Association of Art Museum Curators annual conference. He has also served as a panelist or consultant for Villa Albertine, the Joan Mitchell Center, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, PhotoNOLA, and the San Antonio Art League among others.

Previously, he held positions at the Masur Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, and Buffalo AKG Art Museum. He is an active member of the Association of Art Museum Curators, having served as a trustee from 2015 to 2020. He earned his Master’s in Art History from the University of California Riverside.