Nyugen E. Smith. Smith is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how ritual, memory, and lived experience shape space, identity, and survival. Working across mixed media drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and performance, he engages material experimentation alongside research-driven inquiry to construct layered visual languages.
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His practice is deeply informed by diasporic histories, oral traditions, and speculative world-building, often centering the body as both a site of knowledge and resistance. Through recurring architectural forms, symbolic structures, and performative gestures, Smith examines how people create refuge, agency, and meaning within conditions of displacement and constraint. His work is less concerned with fixed narratives than with proposing spaces for reflection, reimagining, and self-determination. Ultimately, Smith is interested in how art can function as a tool for critical inquiry, collective memory, and the imagining of alternative social and spatial possibilities.
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Nyugen lives and works in Jersey City, NJ, USA and holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History, Norway, Frist Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. He is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
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The program began with a moving poetry recital by @ernest_the_wrytter , setting the tone for the gathering and reflecting the spirit of exchange and collective engagement. This was followed by an intimate artist talk in which Nyugen shared insights into his background, family history, and the influences that continue to inform and inspire his work.
Participants were then guided through the pavilion, which hosts sculptural installations composed of found materials collected from around LuCAC and the surrounding community.
The walkabout continued into the studio space, which came alive with a musical performance by @nk_certified, offering another layer of sonic and spatial experience within the residency environment.
The afternoon concluded at the final site across the property with a projection of a video installation featuring a film developed by Nyugen, bringing the gathering to a thoughtful close through moving image and reflection.
Nyugen E. Smith’s Sustaining the Otherwise residency at LuCAC is part of the project’s year-long multilocational exhibition and artistic program “Practicing Otherwise” supported by Nordic Culture Fund.
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Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative, multilocational research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation, initiated by curators Amal Alhaag and @selenewendt in 2023.
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