Assembled Inheritance

“Assembled Inheritance” brings together the work of Cuong Lam and Kacy McKinney, tracing the ways memory, loss, ritual and material carry what is inherited and what is left behind. Through conversations and studio visits, the artists developed an exhibition that reveals connections between their practices while preserving their distinct voices.

Lam draws from a cultural inheritance of stories, offerings and food, where memory is sustained through acts of gathering and giving. His work re-engages objects from his upbringing in a Vietnamese community transplanted to America through a ceramic hand-building process that combines distilled forms, labor-intensive surfaces, and the layering and removal of color.

McKinney reclaims used cotton seersucker shirts as base materials to create patchwork panels that resemble stained glass when illuminated. With these pieces, she expands on a process of reworking clothing from those who have passed away into what she refers to as “Mourning Attire,” clothes made in the space of grief to honor those lost.

Exhibited together, these works present inheritance as something continually assembled: carried within objects, gestures, stories and materials; shaped by absence as much as presence; and transformed when passed from one person, place and generation to another.

Artist biographies

Cuong Lam is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in ceramics in Portland, Oregon. Lam’s practice builds on a ceramics education across several institutions, including Harvard, MassArt, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Cohorts.Art, as well as a professional career in graphic design. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Lam has produced award-winning designs for major companies including Adobe and Intel, contributed to innovative startups such as Pivotal and HashiCorp, and collaborated with cultural institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

Kacy McKinney (she/they) is a visual artist, independent scholar and avid birder based in Portland, Oregon. McKinney is artist-scholar in residence at the Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at Portland State University and has served on the boards of Sisters of the Road and the Independent Publishing Resource Center, where she completed the Comics Portfolio Program in 2019. She holds a doctorate in human geography from the University of Washington, a master’s degree in Latin American studies and a bachelor’s degree in Portuguese from the University of Texas at Austin. Notable residencies include Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, PLAYA at Summer Lake, The Verdancy Project, Trailer Blaze and the Mesa Refuge. McKinney has received grants from organizations including the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation.

Student apprenticeship

For this exhibition, WSU Vancouver student Juan Romero apprenticed with Lam during summer 2026, gaining experience in ceramics and professional studio arts practices.