Public Lecture: Phong Bui

Phong Bui. Photo by Nicola Delorme.

Join us on Thursday, January 16 for our first Public Lecture of 2025. Cranbrook Academy of Art’s 2024-25 Public Lecture Series is free and open to the public at Cranbrook’s deSalle Auditorium. Cranbrook Art Museum is open late and free to all on Thursdays, please arrive early to explore their current exhibitions.

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.” Bui was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine and a “ringmaster” of the “Kings County art world” by The New York Observer. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 (2007-10). He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and its imprint, Rail Editions.

Bui is a Board Trustee of the International Association of Art Critics (2007-2019), Anthology Film Archives (2017-2023), Denniston Hill, Fountain House, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Monira Foundation, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, the Third Rail, and the Center for Fiction.

He was a senior critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA, (2012-15). He has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts (2012-16). Bui has received numerous awards, most recently including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts (2021), an Honorary Doctorate of University of the Arts (2020), the Jetté Award for Leadership in the Arts, Colby College Museum of Art (2019),and The Lunder Fellowship, The Lunder Institute for American Art (2019).