In …here’s where I come in, artist Nyugen E. Smith presents Zone of Progress, a compelling new body of works on paper that represents both a formal and conceptual pivot from his long-running Bundle House series. Known for exploring diasporic memory, forced migration, and speculative architectures of Black resilience, Smith here turns inward—repositioning himself not only as maker, but as subject. While his distinct material sensibility persists—gestural mark-making, repetition, and collage—Zone of Progress introduces a reflexive element, with Smith’s own figure entering the composition as witness, intercessor, and symbolic vessel.
The series was developed during a period of intensified social and political pressure in the United States. Against this backdrop, Smith confronts personal and professional thresholds: the approach of his fiftieth year, the demands of sustaining an art practice, and a deepening inquiry into the purpose of art in a moment of cultural instability. These questions gather at what Smith identifies as the Crossroads, a potent concept drawn from Afro-diasporic cosmologies—including Haitian Vodou and Yoruba-derived systems such as Ifá—where it denotes a spiritually charged site of transition, communication, and decision-making.
Smith’s use of the Crossroads motif extends beyond metaphor. It informs the structural logic of the series, framing his insertion into the work as both a ritual gesture and a critical interruption. This move coincides with his engagement with motivational and cognitive-performance literature, most notably Patrick Mouratoglou’s Champion Mindset, in which the “Progress Zone” is theorized as the productive inverse of the comfort zone: a psychological and behavioral state in which growth, challenge, and self-discipline converge. For Smith, this concept resonates as both a strategy for coping with creative uncertainty and a framework for reimagining authorship.
While much of Smith’s earlier work has focused on collective memory and transhistorical trauma, Zone of Progress occupies a more introspective terrain. By making his own image and presence central to the composition, he addresses a recurring question in contemporary practice—“Where are you in the work?”—and does so with disarming clarity. The exhibition’s title, …and here’s where I come in., echoes a familiar phrase of narrative entry. Yet in Smith’s hands, it becomes a critical refrain, signaling both a return and a reconstitution of the artist’s position in relation to his archive, his community, and his own becoming.
About Nyugen Smith
Nyugen E. Smith is an artist living and working in Jersey City, NJ. His practice revolves around the construction of narrative through the prism of Black cultural identity. He holds a BFA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History, Norway, Frist Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is currently on view at the Smithsonian. Nyugen is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, Dr. Doris Derby Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
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