Join us for a Visiting Artist talk with Nyugen Smith as a part of the Summer 2026 Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
Nyugen E. Smith is a Jersey City, NJ–based artist whose work investigates how stories are formed, transmitted, and disrupted within Black cultural life. His practice is grounded in an examination of the enduring effects of European colonial expansion and how those histories continue to shape experiences across the African Diaspora and the world at-large.
At the core of this inquiry is an interest in how inherited histories take root and reemerge through a range of intersecting concerns. Architecture, language, embodied action, ritual, intergenerational trauma, genetic memory, environmental change, and patterns of movement and displacement all function as points of convergence within his work.
Nyugen holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum of Latin American Art, and the Peréz Art Museum among others. He is the recipient of several awards including Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund.