A performance by 2023 Lunder Institute for American Art and Colby Arts Office visiting fellow, performance art fellow and Summer Think Tank 2023 participant Nyugen E. Smith as part of the Taking the White Gloves Off Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady, a partnership with the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Colby College Museum of Art’s Lunder Institute for American Art, and the Colby Arts Office.
Nyugen E. Smith is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, NJ who works primarily in the areas of mixed media drawing, found object assemblage, and performance. His practice is interested in world-building, informed by the intersection of ritual, memory, language, history, and art-making processes that prioritize the re-use of discarded materials and objects, the body, and play, through the lens of Blackness. His process, of walking and observing to source materials, teaches him about spaces, landscapes, and the people who traverse them.
Nyugen holds a BA in Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History-Norway, Frist Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Nyugen is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, Dr. Doris Derby Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.