Artist Statement

Nicolei Buendia Gupit is a Filipina-American multidisciplinary artist who works across sculpture, video, installation, and drawing to investigate how the American dream, meritocracy, and global capitalism shape migrant and diasporic experiences. Storytelling and memory serve as critical source material for her mixed-media works. Through papermaking, collage, and mold-and-casting techniques, materials from the artist’s surroundings combine and layer to form multisensory experiences. As a whole, her works telescope from the personal to the global to draw attention to how immigrant and diasporic communities respond to socioeconomic pressures posed by global capitalism.

Artist Bio

Gupit has exhibited her work globally at art spaces including spazioSERRA, in Milan, Italy; Art Fair Philippines in Manila, Philippines; the We Are South Music & Arts Festival in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in San Jose, CA; and the Painting Center in New York City, NY. She obtained her BA in Studio Art from Williams College in 2013 and her MFA from Michigan State University in 2022. She works between Metro Manila, Philippines, and Burlington, Vermont, USA, and teaches at the University of Vermont as a Henderson-Harris Postdoctoral Fellow.