Phong Bui Vietnam, b. 1964

Phong H. Bui is a multifaceted citizen of the New York art world. Roberta Smith, in her review of Come Together: Surviving Sandy in the New York Times likened him to, “[In] Jane Jacobs’s words, ‘people with ideas of their own,’ who help keep a city alive and moving forward on countless fronts in art and in life.”

He was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine in 2014 and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer in 2015. In addition to being an artist, writer, independent curator, and former Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-2010), he is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the free monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, the publishing press Rail Editions, Rail Curatorial Projects, and the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. 

Since 2000, Bui has curated nearly 60 one-person and group exhibits. In 2013 he founded Rail Curatorial Projects, which aims to curate group exhibits that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions. Mostly recently presented is Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale and at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine, and which originated in 2017 at Mana Contemporary as an invocation of urgent social and political issues such as human rights and equality, immigration, foreign relations, the environment, and climate change.

All aspects of his activities, from publishing, writing, editing, curating, to art practice, including executing large-scale installation, making portraits of featured interviewees in the Rail and other forms of social activism are integral parts of his “social environment,” a consequential step following Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.