Name: Artist Talk: Colette Fu
Start: 2025-11-13T17:30:00-05:00
Location: 1715 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville, TN 37996-4521, United States

Art + Architecture Building, McCarty Auditorium, 5:30pm

Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based artist who received her MFA in Fine Art in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after, began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. Her pop-up books are housed in esteemed institutions such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many private and rare archive collections. Her most significant body of work, “We Are Tiger Dragon People, “is an ongoing extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minority groups. Colette created the world’s largest pop-up book, Tao Hua Yuan Ji, which measures 14 x 21 feet, which people could enter at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image.
Fu’s accolades include a 2024 Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Grant, a 2023 Artworks Grant, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, and the 2018 Meggendorfer Prize for best paper-engineered artist book. Additionally, she was honored with a 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship to China and received grants from various foundations and organizations such as the Independence Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, En Foco, Red Bull, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Puffin Foundation and the Society for Photographic Education. She has participated in fully funded artist residencies, including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Sacatar, the Vermont Studio Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, the Millay Colony and the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity. Colette exhibits widely and has had numerous solo exhibitions, such as at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Taubman Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Philadelphia Athenaeum, and many university art galleries.
As a devoted educator, Fu conducts artmaking classes to amplify community voices through pop-up paper-engineered projects. She leads pop-up courses and community workshops internationally.