MOFSA is pleased to announce that Trinh Mai has received a 2024 Spiritual Art Grant.
Trinh Mai is a California-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is driven by innovative narratives of storytelling. Her work spans many media, including paint, found object sculpture, works on paper and combinations of all these. With grace and delicacy she binds natural materials (stones, sticks, eggshells, seeds), and family mementos (photographs, threads, buttons) to create installations dedicated to loss and hope. She has painted murals in public spaces, including on the campus of UCLA and the Los Angeles airport.
Her art incorporates the stories of her extended family and the families who fled Vietnam into art pieces that speak not only to their personal struggles, tragedies, successes and hopes, but to the greater immigration stories worldwide. She is examining why people migrate, their search for hope and reconciling the anguish of not knowing the fate of those lost. Her work is infused with deep belief and a seeking after truth. In her words, her work embodies Art, Prayer, Life, Faith and is.
“ … an invaluable tool that has granted me the opportunity to live the refugee, immigrant experiences vicariously through the ones who arrived before me, allowing me to interpret these stories through my own ears, eyes and hands. With deep respect, I bind these inherited stories into our witnessing of history’s alliteration, of persecution and injustice, of mass exodus and the tribulations that we continue to face upon arrival, and of the anticipated opportunities that indeed await us on new horizons as we set our gaze upon home and promise.
“My current work serves as an aperture into which I examine the stories of an enduring People who have been targeted worldwide, amidst an immigration and refugee crisis that has been a consistent humanitarian struggle throughout all of human history. Drawn from intimate experiences of heartache and triumph, of struggle and perseverance, and of loss and provision, my art practice strives to find comfort by searching for, and then sharing the discovered faith, fulfillment, and freedom that have fostered me/Us during these anguishing times.”
Trinh Mai is a second-generation Vietnamese-American, the daughter of Vietnamese people who fled Vietnam by any means possible after the war there. She has a BFA from San Jose State University, and has also studied at UCLA. Some of her roles include being Project Director for the Vietnamese-American Arts & Letters Association, Course Director for the Pacific Symphony, and Curator for the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. As an artist she has collaborated with many community and art groups, including (but not limited to) the Golden State Warriors Community Foundation, the International Rescue Committee, the San Diego Art Institute, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
We are honored to acknowledge the fine work of this artist.
