Welcome to the Bunker Questionnaire, a new series in which we ask Bunker Projects residents and exhibiting artists three questions from Marcel Proust’s famous Proust Questionnaire, a survey that purported to reveal a person’s true nature. We hope their answers and the accompanying photos allow you to get to know them and their work a little bit more.
Noelle Choy’s work lives mostly as performative sculpture, objects, and video to seek counter-narratives in cultural mythmaking and the phenomenon of getting big inside our bodies. Often working in collaboration, she uses improvised methods and materials to distort biographies, thinking about reenactment, mothers and haunted memories. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, including at Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens NY), Satellite Art Fair (Brooklyn NY), Proyecto Píkaro (Mexico City, Mexico), and Snug Harbor Cultural Center (Staten Island, NY), among others. She has been awarded residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center and Stove Works, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Color Network, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design. Choy is a recipient of the Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts from the American Austrian Foundation and a 2025 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award Fellow. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Kansas City Art Institute in the Painting department.
Describe yourself in three words.
“Big, bright, spaceship.”
Who are your favorite artists/the ones who’ve influenced you most?
“My first studio assistant job with Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw was the first time making work not preciously or perfectly. On my first day (of nearly seven years), I was gluing wig hair onto a papier-mâché monkey with a popsicle stick, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is real life.’
“However, I’ve probably been most influenced by all of my friends who remind me constantly and in different ways that art-making is a practice that is very hard. I feel like we’re all working through challenges and random thoughts both inside and outside of the studio, complaining and bouncing ideas off each other. That kind of company is so important in my practice and life.”
What is your idea of happiness?
“A warm, sunny day with my dog, feeling slow and like there’s nothing I need to be doing, or anywhere else I should be.”
Photography by Anna Brewer Productions
If you’d like to support Bunker Projects’ mission to provide a safe, equitable space for emerging artists to develop their practice and create new works for exhibition, please consider joining our Bunker Commons program or making a one-time or recurring donation here. We are so grateful for your generosity.
