biography

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (b. 1988, Atlanta, GA) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working through precarious amalgamations of found, made, and altered textiles, ceramics, objects, and fragments, she traces how forces of trade, conquest, and dispossession are pressed into bodies, land, and memory. Her work reconstitutes what persists in their wake: the weight of extraction and loss, and the care that made survival possible. Her practice is rooted in her Thai and Indonesian-Chinese heritage and foregrounds the embodied knowledge of immigrant and rural communities and the often-invisible labor of women.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Brooklyn Museum, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2025, she presented What we hold in time's tender keeping, a solo exhibition at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY. Her work is recognized by The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, and the Guardian, and is held in permanent collections at the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her public commissions include Worlds Stir in the Tender Shoots of Memory (2025), a mosaic mural commissioned by Cambridge Arts, and Time Owes Us Remembrance (2023), a three-story textile installation commissioned by the U.S. Embassy Bangkok for the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

Phingbodhipakkiya is a 2025 Artists & Mothers Grantee, a 2024 New York City Artadia Awardee, and a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Visual Arts. She has received support from the Sloan Foundation, the Café Cultural Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, and has held residencies with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, The Luminary, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Commission on Human Rights. Her public work has reached millions across New York City and worldwide, including through the cover of TIME Magazine.

Artist Statement

My sculptures trace how history is pressed into bodies, land, and memory, and what persists after deliberate extraction and casual violence.

I bring together found, made, and altered objects into precarious sculptural forms that hold both tenderness and strain. I work with materials marked by coercion and care: reclaimed silk, rusted farm tools, porcelain shards, woven rattan, rice grains, and sugarcane stalks, materials that carry histories of trade, conquest, labor, and dispossession.

The sculptures may stand as tall as a stooped elder or rise to the height of a banyan tree, always insisting that knowledge and narrative are transmitted as much through gesture as through language. I conceal their support structures so the forms appear impossible, on the verge of collapse. I want viewers to ask the same question I ask of diasporic communities who have endured unbearable conditions: what invisible threads kept you from falling apart?

My practice begins in the body, in hands that peeled garlic before they learned to sew, that worked a cash register before they worked a clay body. I am the daughter of Thai and Indonesian-Chinese immigrants, descended from farmers and fishermen, raised inside the labor and love of a restaurant kitchen. After spending five months living and working alongside weavers and village elders in rural Thailand, I came to understand their intimacy and uncelebrated effort not as subject matter, but as method. As inheritance. As the ground from which everything I make grows.

I make records of endurance, built from what survived. A teetering fragment of sedimentary earth, embedded with shell casings and supporting a bird cage, held together by ochre thread. A structure built the way my mother's family built everything: around the wreckage, with what was left, refusing to let the weight win.

Awards & Residencies

  • Artists & Mothers Grantee (2025)

  • New York City Artadia Awardee (2024)

  • Materials for the Arts Residency (2024)

  • The Luminary Artist Residency (2024)

  • Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2023-25)

  • Poster House Civic Practice Artist Residency (2023)

  • SF Asian Art Museum Civic Practice Artist Residency (2023)

  • TIME Cover (March 2021)

  • Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights (2020-2021)

Pronounciation

Amanda’s last name is Thai and pronounced (PUNG-bodee-bak-ee-ah)