Contemplate modes of painting at artist talks with Andrew Kuo and Nengi Omuku
Join Andrew Kuo and Nengi Omuku for two artist talks that expound on their new SCAD Museum of Art exhibitions. In conversation with chief curator Daniel S. Palmer, Kuo will discuss Attachments and his use of painting as a tool to visualize personal data, questioning the role art can play in communicating meaning. Omuku will then speak with curator Ben Tollefson on There We Sat Down and how her painting practice blends oil techniques and heritage materials to create ethereal works that evoke shared human experience.
About the artists
Andrew Kuo (b. 1977, Queens, New York; lives and works in New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work across painting and sculpture often presents personal narratives to expand on the potential of both hard-edged and expressionist abstraction. Kuo has had numerous solo exhibitions with Broadway Gallery in New York and Tanya Leighton in Los Angeles, as well as previously in New York at Taxter & Spengemann and Marlborough Gallery. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions with Public Art Fund, New York (2020); Artists Space, New York (2005); the International Print Center, New York (2019); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn. (2015); the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice (2019); the Asia Song Society, New York (2011); the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Ariz. (2011); and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2011), among others. He is the host of Cookies Hoops basketball and culture podcast, a regular contributor to T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and the co-author of The Joy of Basketball: An Encyclopedia of the Modern Game.
Using the subject of the body to translate interior experience, Nengi Omuku’s (b. 1987, Warri, Nigeria; lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria and London) expressive paintings portray abstracted figures among spectacular, celestial landscapes that draw evocatively from the natural world, horticulture, and creationism. Omuku spent many years in London while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, where oil painting remained central to the established canon. Her distinctive, multifaceted process culminates in the application of oil paint in richly textured brushstrokes to gesso-prepared composite strips of the Nigerian fabric sanyan. A tightly woven, hand-spun material, sanyan is one of several forms of textile that have shaped Nigeria’s cultural history. Omuku’s unique practice, which involves active research into and custodianship of the production of sanyan, interlaces traditions that honor both the artist’s West African heritage and her personal experiences, touching on themes of gender and domesticity, national and ceremonial dress, and the endurance of indigenous culture in the face of colonial rule.
Omuku was selected to join the inaugural Artist Council of the Museum of West African Art, Benin City, in 2025. She has earned numerous scholarships and awards, including the British Council CHOGM Art Award presented by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Commissions include a 2018 mural in an intensive care psychiatric ward at the Maudsley Hospital, London, from the Arts Council England. In 2021, she received a World Trade Organization Residency organized by African Art Foundation in Geneva. Omuku has presented solo exhibitions at Kasmin, New York; Hastings Contemporary, U.K.; and Arnolfini, Bristol, U.K., among other venues. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria; Dak’Art, African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K.; Saint Louis Art Museum; and the Bangkok Art Biennale. In 2023, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Residency in Italy following a 2022–23 residency at Black Rock Senegal. Omuku’s work is held in international public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Newark Museum of Art, N.J.; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the HSBC Art Collection; and the Loewe Art Collection, among others.