Artist Talk
About
Artist Bhasha Chakrabarti draws from South Asian, Hawaiian, and African-American aesthetic traditions to recalibrate dominant historical narratives that depend on willful erasure. Chakrabarti’s artistic practice commits to the excavation of pre-existing historical narratives across the global South. Chakrabarti acknowledges and makes visible the interdependencies between marginalized communities in the North, and imagines solidarities and alternative futures.
Free with museum admission. Registration for this in-person program is requested.
This talk is presented by RISD’s Textiles Department in conjunction with the course Many Hands, Many Voices: Textiles Histories in the Americas.
Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu, HI) is interested in exploring how artwork, even when grounded in local materials and symbols, can speak to issues beyond the local by situating her practice within global conversations around race, gender, and power. Her practice places equal importance on the visual content of painting, the performativity of the act of painting, and the materiality of the cloth on which paintings are made. She continuously draws from South Asian, Hawaiian, and African-American aesthetic traditions in order to recalibrate the dominant epistemological hierarchies which are otherwise dependent on willful erasure. Her commitment to art-making is therefore to an excavation of pre-existing historical intimacies across the global South, to acknowledging and making visible existing interdependencies between marginalized communities in the North, and to imagining solidarities and alternative futures.
Bhasha Chakrabarti graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in the Spring of 2022. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows at Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Jeffery Deitch (New York & Los Angeles), Hales (New York), Experimenter (Kolkata), M+B (Los Angeles), and Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore). Chakrabarti is the recipient of the 2023 South Asia Artist Prize (SAAI) awarded by University of California, Berkeley. She was a semi-finalist in the Smithsonian’s 2022 Outwin-Boochever Portrait Competition and was awarded a Beinecke Research Fellowship in 2021 and the Fountainhead Residency in 2020. Chakrabarti recently completed the Hampi Art Labs Residency in India and currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.