Featured Artist: Trinh Mai
Trinh Mai is a second-generation Vietnamese American visual artist who examines the refugee and immigrant experience, then and now. Through a vast breath of media, she helps tell the stories of "we," the enduring People, while focusing on our witnessing of war, the wounds we’ve survived, our collective need to heal, the longsuffering hope that carries us through deep waters, and the custodial responsibility to which we are heirs.
As a California-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is driven by innovative narratives of storytelling, her artistic creations re-imagine personal and inherited memories, family roots, and spiritual connections that alter conceptions of our identities and shared histories. Since receiving her BFA in Pictorial Art from San José State University and furthering her studies at UCLA, Mai has continued exhibiting with works taking residence in public and private collections internationally.
Mai was named University of Washington’s Walker-Ames Guest Scholar in 2019, awarded the Long Beach Professional Artist Fellowship in 2021, and was commissioned in 2022 as inaugural muralist for the newly renovated wing of Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, where she created a 185-foot mural that speaks on migration and freedom. In 2023, she was named a California Creative Corps Fellow, during which she developed arts programming with Khmer Girls in Action for the empowerment of young Cambodian women in Long Beach, and in 2024, was awarded the Visiting Mellon Practitioner Fellowship at Brown University. In 2025, she received the First Place Award for the Artist Alliance Biennial at the Oceanside Museum of Art.
Sharing her inspiration and vision for "How Long," this Quarterly's featured work, Mai states: "The title
references Psalm 13:1 wherein the author writes, 'How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?' This work is dedicated to the ones whose compassion has called them to take up iron for a fight that may not be directly theirs, but whose fragile eyes serve as mirrors while witnessing the suppression that deteriorates the dignity of life. This is for the faithful ones who continue in hope, the ones that know that all things pass, the ones who recognize that without hope there exists only the horror of looming defeat. To the longsuffering who draw in slow, patient breaths into withered lungs: Arise. This fight is not in vain."
Find out more about Mai here: https://trinhmai.com/biography
[Images: (Cover, above, and back page) Trinh Mai, How Long, 2019. Acrylic, charcoal, gouache, hand embroidery, pressed leaves, scripture and tree bark on paper. 28 1/2 x 22 1/2"]