An-My Le at MoMA. Eddie Martinez's Big Butterflies

I’ve been around long enough to see that history is cyclical. We always talk about how the Vietnam War was a lesson learned, but it wasn’t. - An-My Le 

At the beginning of this year, the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of the works an An-My Le titled: An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers. The title refers to the Mekong and Mississippi river deltas, to Vietnam and the United States.

 

 

Le was born in Vietnam in 1960. She grew up having to contend with continuous conflict. She says that one of her early memories is standing across from her Catholic school, that was bombed about twenty minutes before she arrived. While she stood across from the smoldering school, she remembers thinking how great it was going to be to have some time off from school.

 

Her family was able to escape to America in 1975, when Le was fifteen years old. She earned a BSA in biology at Stanford University, were she planned to study medicine,  and, instead, went on to receive an MFA in photography at Yale School of Art.

 

Le returned to Vietnam twenty years after her escape. She recorded landscapes trough the lens of her camera, where she was both detached and very much a part of the scenes. Her works continue to examine the dichotomies and the far-reaching consequences of war.

 

Her escape from the war led her to America, to much success as an artist, to becoming  a Professor of Photography at Bard College and creating a home and family in Brooklyn. 

 

An-My Le’s works are in the permanent collection of The Met, MoMA, the Whitney, The Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Centre National des Arts Plastique, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale and many other major venues. 

 

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 Brooklyn-based artist, Eddie Martinez (b. 1977) has been having a run of incredible, successful shows: he represented the Republic of San Marino at this year’s Venice Biennale and large, dynamic works were shown earlier this year at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in New York. His work is currently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. The show is called Buflies…the name his young son gave to butterflies wen he was two. 

 

 

Butterflies have been a recurring subject in Martinez’s work as have other subjects. Whatever the subject, Martinez paints with a dynamic energy, bold lines and colors.

 

The work of Eddie Martinez is part of the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, the Yuz Museum and The Morgan Library in New York City.

 

Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of An-My Le or Eddie Martinez available at VFA.

 

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August 13, 2024