About
CONTACT
The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
253 36th Street
3rd Floor, Ste. C304
Brooklyn, NY 11232
Mailbox Unit #20
Phong Bui Studio
Contact for an appointment
phong@brooklynrail.org
BIOGRAPHY
Phong H. Bui (b. 1964 in Huế, Vietnam; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a multifaceted citizen of the New York art world. Roberta Smith, in her review of Come Together: Surviving Sandy in the New York Times likened him to, “[In] Jane Jacobs’s words, ‘people with ideas of their own,’ who help keep a city alive and moving forward on countless fronts in art and in life.” Bui was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-10). He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions. He was the Host and Producer of Off the Rail on Art International Radio (2010-15).
Bui is a Board Trustee of the International Association of Art Critics (2007-2019), Anthology Film Archives (2017-2023), Fountain House, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, the Third Rail, and the Center for Fiction. He is on the Advisory Boards of Art Omi Pavilions, Denniston Hill, Floating Forest, Sky High Farms, among others. Bui is also the Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, a non-profit which, in addition to a robust residency program, aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming in Jersey City and beyond.
All aspects of his activities, from publishing, writing, editing, curating, to art practice, including executing large-scale installation, making portraits of featured interviewees in the Rail and other forms of social activism are integral parts of his “social environment,” a consequential step following Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.
Since 2000, Bui has curated over 90 one-person and group exhibitions. In 2013 he founded Rail Curatorial Projects, which aims to curate group exhibitions that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions, including Come Together: Surviving Sandy (2013, Industry City), Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior (2014, Red Bull Studios), Bloodflames Revisited (2014, Kasmin Gallery), Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable Sized Paintings (2015, Mana Contemporary), Intimacy in Discourse: Unreasonable Sized Painting (2015, SVA Chelsea Gallery), and Hallway Hijack (2016, 66 Rockwell Place).
Since 2017, Bui has worked on a series of exhibitions titled after Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio’s neon work Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, as an invocation of urgent social and political issues such as human rights and equality, immigration, foreign relations, the environment, and climate change. These exhibitions include OCCUPY MANA (2017, Mana Contemporary), OCCUPY COLBY (2019, Colby Museum of Art), Mare Nostrum (2019, Collateral Project at the Venice Biennale), and most recently Singing in Unison, an ongoing curatorial project, in ten parts thus far (2022, Art Cake, 447 Space, Below Grand, Ricco/Maresca, TOTAH, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Industry City; 2023, Industry City; 2024, SLAG & RX, Ruttkowski;68).
Bui was a senior critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA, (2012-15). He has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts (2012-16). Bui has received numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts (2021), an Honorary Doctorate of University of the Arts (2020), the Jetté Award for Leadership in the Arts, Colby College Museum of Art (2019), The Lunder Fellowship, The Lunder Institute for American Art (2019), The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Prize in Fine Art Journalism (2017), The Esther Montanez Leadership Award, Fountain House (2016), Art in General Visionary Honoree (2014), Annual Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), The Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation, National Academy Museum (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1995) Arcadia Traveling Fellowship (1998) a Hohenberg Traveling Fellowship (1987), among others.