The Latest Collectors Collaborative Outing

On December 6, 2025, members of the BCMA’s Collectors Collaborative gathered in Brooklyn to meet artist Tommy Kha. We began our visit at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, where Kha is currently an artist-in-residence. He showed us examples of his most recent work, including a series of self-portrait pillows and a second series of self-portrait photographs taken at night throughout New York City.   

During his artistic career, Kha has used photography to explore ideas of personal displacement and dislocation. Growing up queer in a Chinese American family in Memphis, Tennessee, he came to understand how one’s sense of identity contains multitudes and is often fragmented. As he has stated, “Memphis has become, for me, not only the place where I was raised but an active borderland between fantasy and memory, nostalgia and history, nonfiction and mythology.”

Kha attended the Memphis College of Art as an undergraduate before entering and graduating from the MFA program at Yale University. During this time, he came to embrace photography as a key element of his practice, which also includes performance and site-specific installations. Begun in 2015 and on-going to this day, his series “I’m Only Here to Leave” features photographs in which he pictures himself, and often his mother, wearing or holding card-board cut-out masks of his face. The idea of fracturing his self-representation and challenging the idea of what a self-portrait might be have been important through-lines in his work.

Kha has had an especially full and exciting period of public recognition in the last year. In addition to his residency at Pioneer Works, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025 and partnered with the Addison Gallery of American Art to realize his first solo museum exhibition, “Other Things Uttered.”

Following our visit to Pioneer Works, Kha led the group to Dumbo, where his current installation “Leftovers” was on view at Higher Pictures. “Leftovers” recreates a dinner room on which a wide assortment of foods are arrayed, all rendered through photography. There he discussed how he develops his installations, as well as the importance of food to his family and to the wider Asian diaspora.

We appreciate greatly Kha’s generosity in meeting with the Collectors Collaborative and hope to invite him to Bowdoin in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, the Collectors Collaborative is currently developing its next outing.  When confirmed, we will be sure to provide an update. Our thanks to the entire membership of the Collectors Collaborative for their support of this initiative. Since 2007, this group has done much to bring together young (and young at heart) alumni in New York City and to grow the BCMA’s collection of ground-breaking contemporary art.