Pulling up to Tammy Nguyen’s picture-perfect studio on an early spring day in pastoral Easton, Connecticut, the first thing you notice is the chicken coop and the sound of a crowing rooster. Inside the revamped lofted barn, the 40-year-old artist, quite pregnant with her third child, hands me a carton of fresh brown and blue eggs to take back to the city. “It’s a different energy and vibe here,” says Nguyen of her and her family’s move from Harlem during Covid. “I was ready to buy the property without even seeing the inside. I was like, ‘that’s the studio.’ We don’t need to see the house.”
Nguyen’s show at Lehmann Maupin New York, “A Comedy for Mortals: Paradiso,” on view from June 5 to August 15, is the culmination of a three-part series that takes Dante’s 14th-century Divine Comedy as its departure point. The trilogy’s first installment, shown at the gallery’s Seoul location two years ago, explored Dante’s Inferno, the author’s famous descent into hell. The second, Purgatory, followed in London 10 months later, based on the allegory’s penultimate section. “And this,” Nguyen says, gesturing at the works in the sun-lit space, “is paradise…at last.”
A prodigious painter and the founder of the Passenger Pigeon Press— an imprint housed on the second floor of her studio that creates the artist book subscription Martha’s Quarterly—as well as a Wesleyan professor of art and recent Guggenheim fellowship winner, Nguyen’s lush, dense work reveals the mind of a polymath. (When asked why the book subscription is named Martha’s Quarterly and not Tammy’s Quarterly, she responds: it is named after Martha, the last passenger pigeon who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. The press is a resurrection of ideas never brought together, so that Martha can live forever in poetry.) Her life-size canvases thread a cerebral, sprawling set of disparate events and imagery, ranging from huge painted eagles to tiny hot-stamped metallic drones and helicopters. “Paradise is basically a space story,” she says. “In this final chapter, Dante follows his love, Beatrice, into the solar system. He starts on earth, goes to the sun, and goes into the ether. What I found so beautiful about Dante’s outlook was that he regarded this journey into heaven as a journey of endless knowledge.”
That insight also led the artist into dark corners. A surprising presence in the show is an acid portrait of Frankenstein infused with florals. “He is mixed into my exploration of heaven,” Nguyen explains. “In 1815, the massive eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora spewed sulfuric ash into the atmosphere, triggering a global fallout called “the year without summer.” Swaths of the planet experienced altered climates and famine, mirroring the effects of nuclear winter. “This is the summer when Lord Byron writes Darkness and when Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein,” she explains. “Frankenstein embodies all of the things that a nuclear bomb does—he’s made out of man’s imagination, intelligence and perseverance— and then he becomes more powerful…so, this is heaven.”
Another piece in the exhibition, Beneath the Shadow of its Wing, features floating, planetary heads of President Eisenhower, and snippets of his final address embedded in a tapestry of paint, metal leaf, and foil stamping. “In the part of the speech I excerpt for the show, he’s warning the public of the increasing power and dynamics of the military industrial complex,” Nguyen says. “He’s talking about knowledge. Dante described traveling into heaven as this endless buffet of knowledge. President Eisenhower's warning is about this really dangerous horizon that happens when you have too much knowledge.” That 1961 message, according to the artist, is now as relevant as ever. “When President Biden gave his farewell address, he was very much echoing this,” she says. “Instead of the industrial military complex, he was talking about the tech industrial complex.”
Tammy Nguyen, Beneath the Shadow of its Wing, 2025
Miniscule text fragments, drawn from historical sources, underpin the show’s kaleidoscopic motifs. “It’s like this dust that is in every single painting,” she muses. In O Good Apollo, tropical foliage, an eagle in profile, an abstract figure, a giant arrow, and the artist’s gilded pointillism form an intricate wilderness. “The ‘dust’ in the painting is actually a famous phrase from the Cold War, ‘the eagle has landed,’ from when the U.S. landed on the moon, establishing dominance,” says Nguyen. “It was such an Easter egg moment for me in the studio because when Dante finally arrives on Jupiter, an eagle soars through the sky and spells ‘Love, Justice’ in Latin.”
Tammy Nguyen, O Good Apollo, 2025
Born to Vietnamese refugee parents, Nguyen traveled in 2007 to Ho Chi Minh City art school on a Fulbright fellowship to study the painstaking traditional technique of lacquer painting. She ended up staying in Vietnam three additional years, working at a ceramics tile company. “Seeing how the global economy works, with big manufacturing floors, opened my eyes to just how complicated and contradictory the world is,” she says. Today, Nguyen describes how her palette can resemble “the light in Manila or Saigon or Bangkok in the middle of the night…it’s hot and humid, and the fluorescent lights of the street market are souring the harmony.”
While she has impeccable art credentials—a Cooper Union BFA, an MFA from Yale—Nguyen credits a foray into taxidermy for her early pivot from diehard abstraction. “I met a bunch of amazing scientists at the Yale Ornithology Library and became a taxidermist in the volunteer program,” she recalls. “I learned how to skin birds for their collection. I did a couple of owls, a ton of starlings and a few hummingbirds. Then I would paint, and the carcasses would trick me into moving away from abstraction.” At the same time, classes in Yale’s Anthropology department began to infuse her work with “a kind of multidisciplinary excitement.” That breadth of medium and perspective will be on display in another exhibition this summer: New York’s Cooper Union library will present “A Comedy for Mortals: Artists’ Books by Tammy Nguyen,” from June 27 to September 26.
Before I leave, Nguyen reveals the inspiration for other symbols embedded throughout the show— doodles that President Kennedy drew during the Cuban Missile cabinet meetings, found in his archives. “Do you see the scribbles? And then there’s a boat. And another arrow, here and here?” she asks as she points to details in the works. “There are a bunch of JFK’s doodles in his yellow pad, done while he was negotiating the Cuban Missile Crisis.” She downloaded remarkable pages of Kennedy’s letters and memos— the words decision, U2, and missile circled everywhere—alongside a childlike face and sailboats penciled by the president as the nation teetered on nuclear war. “I have to do all of this so that I can build the world,” she says. “Everything is imbued with meaning. As much as Dante’s Divine Comedy is a story about space, it’s really a story about people. It’s very fleshy. I’ve always thought of Inferno as being Inferno on earth, Purgatory on earth, and then Heaven on earth.”
