Huong Ngô headshot

Huong Ngô

Interdisciplinary Artist

Hương Ngô (Huong Ngo, Ngô Ngọc Hương, 吳玉香) is an artist born in Hong Kong, often working between France and Vietnam, and currently based in Chicago where she is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Having grown up as a refugee in the American South, she engages histories of colonialism and migration, particularly in relationship to language, structures of power, and ideologies. The body and, alternately, its absence and its traces are strongly present in her work, which often asks how we might make visible the process of our own subject formation. Beginning her studies as a biology major, she received her BFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2001) and continued in Art & Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2004).

Her research and archive-based practice began while a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. She was recently awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) to realize a project, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France, recently exhibited at DePaul Art Museum (2017), and continued through the Camargo Core Program (2018), that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. Her work, described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune, has exhibited at the MoMA, MCA Chicago, Nhà Sàn Collective, and Para Site and supported by Chicago Artists Coalition, DCASE, and Sàn Art, among others.

Both archeological and futuristic, her work operates in layers, continuously making and unmaking an unruly archive.

Featured Artworks

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Next Level / Spare Room Awards

A unique concept in the grantmaking field in which a second award at a higher level is distributed to a past recipient, the 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Awards reflect our belief that once is not enough and that artists thrive with continued investment at critical junctures.

With support from an Anonymous Donor at the Chicago Community Foundation, we have inaugurated this program by giving unrestricted cash grants of $50,000 to three women visual artists who are past 3Arts awardees practicing in the Chicago metropolitan area. We will offer this program again in 2021 to honor three additional women visual arts awardees. Our hope is to expand these awards for artists working in the performing arts.

Selection Process

3Arts awardees who meet the eligibility requirements are invited to submit an online application. A panel of three distinguished judges convene to review the applications and select the recipients. Recipients are artists who are actively making distinctive and compelling work; have plans to advance their next creative leap and/or project; and are at a critical juncture when an award of this size and nature could have a significant impact.

Meet the judging panel

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