An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b.1960)

Silent General series, 2017

Pigment print
40 x 56 ½ in.; 40 ¼ x 56 ¾ in framed

Photographer An-My Lê depicts a range of contemporary American communal experiences from religious meetings to protest rallies, and from 4th of July parties to the daily lives of migrant laborers. Lê’s imagery raises questions about coexisting American realities and invites questions such as: How can our distinctive, and often contradictory American histories be represented in public space?

Lê’s ongoing Silent General series takes its name from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, a diaristic collection of prose fragments about the poet’s life in relation to historical events. Whitman voices his admiration for the self-effacing Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, who, through the American ideals of pragmatism and hard work, helped to bring about the end of the American Civil War becoming a peacetime president. Her photographic series takes on the free-associative cadence of Whitman’s text while also countering the incendiary political rhetoric of our time.

An-My Lê was born in Vietnam in 1960 and fled with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the US as a political refugee. Lê received BA and MA degrees in biology from Stanford University (1981,1985) and an MFA from Yale University (1993). She is a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award (2007), and the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship (2010). Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. A major retrospective of Lê’s work will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2023.

More information on An-My Lê can be found here:

https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/51-an-my-le/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/arts/design/an-my-le.html