The Political Uses of Madness

Tammy Nguyen's artistic practice is reliably fixated on historical context and narrative. Her work combines the investigation of geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories with myth and fantasy producing enchanting visual narratives that blur the lines of fiction and nonfiction.

For this exhibition, Nguyen has created a new series of circular paintings in response to documents from the Ellsberg Papers housed in UMass Libraries collections in addition to specimens from the UMass Herbarium.

During her residency with the University Museum of Contemporary Art, which began over the summer of 2025, Nguyen closely studied documents related to U.S. nuclear diplomacy and Ellsberg’s Paradox, a theory about how ambiguity influences human decision-making. In particular, a key lecture presented at the Lowell Institute in 1959, “The Political Uses of Madness,” provides a conceptual frame (and title) for the exhibition. 

Excerpts from the lecture are recontextualized within the paintings. Meanwhile, the paintings’ imagery draws from anti-nuclear poetry and protest materials found in the Ellsberg archive, in which everyday people expressed concerns and anxieties about the specter of nuclear war.

The exhibition is part of the museum’s ongoing Dialogue with a Collection exhibition series, an annual program in which a contemporary artist is invited to engage with the museum’s permanent collection. This year, in an expanded iteration of the series, Nguyen was invited to explore beyond the museum’s holdings and delve into UMass Amherst’s broader archival resources.