An-My Lê will present a collection of vintage jumbo zippo-style lighters that she has been amassing over the past 2 years. The lighters have been etched and swaddled in various woven cozies in her studio. The collection was exhibited as an installation this past summer. This is Lê’s first foray into this type of work. The project engages the notion of collecting with the premise of the objet trouve while examining the psychic wound of wars, past and present. Lê will share two short excerpts of writings by Arthur Danto and Richard Sennet that she hopes will engender a lively discussion about the relationship between work and play and the underpinnings of the imagination in the interpretation of the work of art.

An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. In 1975, the final year of the war, she fled Vietnam with her family, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. Lê received BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford and an MFA from Yale. Her photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war. Whether in color or black-and-white, her pictures frame a tension between the natural landscape and its violent transformation into battlefields.

She has received many awards, including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2012), the National Science Foundation, Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (2007), the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (20064), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1996). She has had major exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2020); Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2017); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2013); Murray Guy, New York (2008, 2010); Dia Beacon (2006); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2006); International Center of Photography Triennial (2006); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2002); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997). Lê lives and works in New York.