Art Militant: Kenny Nguyen’s "Confluence" Breathes New Life Into The Branch

On a humid September evening, I approached the massive stone entry of The Branch, as most locals would call it, with a group of students from my mentorship program. The museum was buzzing — every gallery was filled and the courtyard alive with conversation. The sights of many embraced the castle-like interiors of the newly rebranded Branch Museum of Design for the opening of Kenny Nguyen’s “Confluence”, a body of work that felt both fragile and formidable.

The Branch House is not a neutral stage for this. As the largest residence in the Fan District, and one of Monument Avenue’s most imposing structures, its weight is undeniable. To see silk—a material so often coded as delicate—reshape its walls was quietly thrilling. Nguyen’s pieces didn’t just adorn the rooms; they unsettled them, pulling attention away from stone and wood toward something softer, more unstable, and ultimately more alive.

What first struck me wasn’t the silk itself, but the way people leaned into it…closer, slower, as though listening to the materials. Nguyen has a way of making fabric behave like weather: it gathers, folds, and shifts as if caught in a breeze that refuses to die down. Standing with my students, I watched them circle one wall piece again and again, trying to pin down its shape, only to realize the work won’t allow such finality. That’s the gift of Nguyen’s practice—he builds in the possibility of change.

For me, the most moving part of the evening came when one of my students stated, “They don’t seem like conventional canvasses. They are more like sculptures. It’s dope”. That comment stayed with me. The dangling threads, the exposed seams, the folds that refuse symmetry— they are the point. Nguyen reminds us that memory, migration, and identity are never tidy things. To witness that realization click in a young person’s mind was as memorable as the artwork’s ironic relevance to place — Kenny created sculptures of transformation on a Historic street known for its “monumental past”, I’d say.

Outside, the Branch’s new “B” sculpture in the courtyard mirrored that sense of reorientation. Sharp, steel, and newly installed, it framed the evening with its own insistence on change. People posed beside it, using it as a marker of arrival. It made sense — here was a museum actively recasting itself.

The Branch’s transition from an architectural museum to a design museum is more than branding strategy. For years, it felt like the house itself was the primary exhibit. An important one, yes, but arguably static. Now, standing on Monument Avenue in the Fan’s largest home expands its aperture as an institution that has chosen to lean into design’s breadth: not just buildings, but objects, fashion, systems, and even speculative futures.

As someone who has watched Richmond’s cultural landscape expand unevenly, I find this shift significant. The Branch isn’t erasing its past—it’s tilting it, asking what else can be seen from a new angle. Nguyen’s exhibition couldn’t be a better gesture. His silk works resist closure, resist categories, resist stillness. The Branch, too, is taking that stance by guiding Richmond toward a future defined not by what’s fixed, but by what’s possible.