The University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst will open a new exhibition, “The Political Uses of Madness” by Tammy Nguyen, October 17. The exhibition runs through May 8.
"The timing of this compelling exhibition could not be better,” said Amanda Herman, associate director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art. “At a moment when our political landscape is in tumult, Tammy invites us, through stunning paintings, to explore the legacy of Daniel Ellsberg whose 1959 essay gives the show its title and provides an entry point to examine and learn from times of past crisis and resistance."
The exhibition is part of the museum’s ongoing Dialogue with a Collection exhibition series, an annual program in which a contemporary artist is invited to engage with the museum’s permanent collection. This year, in an expanded iteration of the series, Nguyen was invited to explore beyond the museum’s holdings and delve into UMass Amherst’s broader archival resources.
Nguyen gravitated toward two sources: papers and materials collected by activist and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, housed in the UMass Libraries Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, and botanical specimens from the UMass Herbarium. Ellsberg was best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers at the height of the Vietnam War.
Her interdisciplinary inquiry informs nine new circular paintings that serve as portals into imagined, fractured worlds.
“Referencing Dante’s nine rings of hell, these circular portals are planets, landscapes seen from a telescope, and the center of one’s eye,” Nguyen writes in her artist statement. “There is no clear horizon, nor a solid sense of what is up and down.”
During her residency, which began over the summer, Nguyen closely studied documents related to U.S. nuclear diplomacy and Ellsberg’s Paradox, a theory about how ambiguity influences human decision-making. In particular, a key lecture presented at the Lowell Institute in 1959, “The Political Uses of Madness,” provides a conceptual frame (and title) for the exhibition.
“Daniel Ellsberg dedicated his life to studying the use of nuclear weapons,” said Jeremy Smith, moving image and sound archivist for SCUA. “From his time as a cold warrior working for the RAND corporation studying what might trigger the use of a nuclear weapon, to his post-government life as an anti-nuclear activist working towards a nuclear-free world, the Ellsberg archive provides a fascinating window into the evolution of his thinking. We are excited to see how artists like Tammy Nguyen are engaging with the archive to provide fresh insights into these critical issues.”
Excerpts from the lecture are recontextualized within the paintings. Meanwhile, the paintings' imagery draws from anti-nuclear poetry and protest materials found in the Ellsberg archive. In these materials, ordinary people expressed fears and anxieties about the possibility of a nuclear war.
Nguyen was especially drawn to two relief prints in a poetry chapbook, one depicting a daisy and the other a handful of wheatgrass. These images led her to the UMass Herbarium, where she studied and sketched specimens from these plant families. The resulting observational drawings evolved into the vividly distorted vegetation featured throughout the exhibition.
Learn more on UMass’ website.