This in-person event is at capacity, but the conversation will be broadcast live via Zoom. Register for the Zoom webinar.
A collaboration between the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and MoMA, this conversation will explore themes of memory, autobiography, authenticity, heritage, and the relationship to photography in the work of artist An-My Lê and writers Monique Truong and Ocean Vuong.
This event is in conjunction with the exhibition An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières. For 30 years, An-My Lê’s photographs have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict. Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora. “Being a landscape photographer,” she has said, “means creating a relationship between various categories—the individual within a larger construct such as the military, history, and culture.”
Registration
This in-person event is completely full. Please register for the Zoom webinar or email [email protected] to be added to the waitlist.
Participants
An-My Lê is a Vietnamese American artist. She was educated at Stanford and Yale universities and has been the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, among other awards. Lê lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York. As a teenager Lê fled Vietnam with her family in 1975. They eventually settled in the United States as political refugees. Her work often addresses the impact of war on culture and on the environment. Lê says her “main goal is to try to photograph landscapes in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture.” Solo exhibitions of Lê's work have been presented at the Sheldon Art Museum, Nebraska; Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden; Baltimore Museum of Art; Dia: Beacon, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and MoMA PS1. In 2020 she presented a major exhibition, On Contested Terrain, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, which traveled to the Amon Carter Museum and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her work has also been included in the Whitney and Taipei biennials as well as in other group shows including the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Tate Modern, London; Brooklyn Museum; and the Guggenheim Museum, among others.
Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her debut novel, The Book of Salt (2003), was a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable Fiction Book, and winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Bard Fiction Prize, among other honors. Along with Bitter in the Mouth (2010) and The Sweetest Fruits (2019), her novels have been translated into 14 languages to date. With Barbara Tran and Khoi Luu, Truong co-edited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition (2023). Truong and designer Thai Nguyen are the co-authors of the children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài, illustrated by Dung Ho, forthcoming in 2025. As a librettist, Truong has collaborated with composers Joan La Barbara, Shih-Hui Chen, Francisco J. Núñez, and Randall Eng. Truong is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, US-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among others. Born in 1968 in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Truong and her parents came to the US as refugees in 1975. She grew up in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas, and is based now in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA from Yale University and a JD from Columbia School of Law.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Time Is a Mother (2022) and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong’s writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, The Nation, New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review_, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Vuong was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and the New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serves as a tenured professor in the creative writing MFA program at New York University.
For over 30 years, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop has been dedicated to publishing and amplifying Asian American literary culture. We operate from a radically inclusive ethos that drives us every day to expand the definition not only of who is a writer, but also of who is Asian American. Through our robust and diverse lineup of programming, we serve as a vital sanctuary space for writers and readers alike. As one of the only national organizations cultivating and curating the next generation of Asian American storytellers, we work to mobilize the literary community toward a more just future.
Accessibility
This theater is equipped with an induction loop that transmits directly to hearing aids with T-coils.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
The nearest all-gender restroom is located on T1.
Wheelchair accessible seating is available on a first come first served basis.
For more information on accessibility at MoMA please visit moma.org/Visit/Accessibility.
The Adobe Foundation is proud to support equity, learning, and creativity at MoMA.
Access and Community Programs are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Major funding is provided by Volkswagen of America, the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art Endowment for Educational Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.