Xinan Helen Ran is an artist specializing in fabric, language, and found objects to construct emotional landscapes. She searches for the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge. Apart from her studio practice, she is an art educator, an art administrator, and an aspirational set designer for new theaters.
Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Ran is a 2024 recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant, a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program in 2023, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident in 2022, and a 2016 Ox-Bow Summer Fellow. Her public art installation, Mobile Home at Sunset Park in Brooklyn, was a commissioned by More Art’s 2024 Emerging Artist program. She will be a NARS Foundation resident artist in late 2025, receiving the full fellowship award.
At MacDowell, Ran created multi-plate etching prints, large-scale fabric drawings, and collected natural materials for her two upcoming solo shows at Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn and Essex Flowers in Manhattan.
