For the first presentation of her work at Grounds For Sculpture, Rina Banerjee will create a suite of new sculptures that will explore the idea of “garden imperialism.” In this exhibition, Banerjee positions the English garden as a vehicle through which to understand British colonial culture and its long imperial entanglements with Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As the artist notes, English gardens were not only a visible expression of “the project of violent control and a stern arm ‘civilizing’ the supposed Other,” but also sites of extraction and expropriation. During the height of the British Empire, Asia, Africa, and the Americas became site of unrelenting botanical plunder. These plant specimens, along with the Indigenous knowledge of them, were harvested, often through coerced and enslaved labor, and sent to England to be studied, catalogued, and commodified. While tracing these colonial histories, Banerjee’s new sculptures will also illuminate the Indigenous and diasporic communities, often led by women, who resisted and undermined Britain’s colonial control. The exhibition, in dialogue with the 42-acre gardens at Grounds For Sculpture, will invite viewers to meditate on themes of extraction, cultivation, transplantation, and the ‘exotic.’
About Rina Banerjee
Rina Banerjee is an accomplished multimedia artist who often combines found objects into complex, multisensorial assemblages. Throughout her career, Banerjee has interrogated the long and lingering effects of colonialism and its abiding relationship to immigration, race, gender, class, and climate collapse. Her practice often reconfigures histories erased and distorted by official archives and dominant narratives, with much of her work centering on the stories of women and communities who have been marginalized because of their racialized identities or immigration status.
Born in Kolkata, India, she lived briefly in Manchester and London before immigrating to New York where she has lived and worked since the 1970s. Banerjee earned a degree in polymer engineering from Case Western University in 1993 and an MFA from Yale University in 1995.
She has participated in 14 biennials around the world, including the 55th and 57th Venice Biennale. In addition to the widely celebrated mid-career retrospective, Banerjee’s work has also been included in important group exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
Banerjee’s works are in public collections around the globe, including The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Hammer Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Queens Museum (New York), Richmond Center for Visual Arts, Western Michigan University, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale Art Gallery.
She is the recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation award and the Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship. In 2022, Banerjee was appointed the inaugural Post-Colonial Critic at Yale University’s Art School. She has also held faculty appointments at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Bennington College, University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 1996 Art Theory, and Bucknell University.
Support is provided, in part, by The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the NJ Department of State, and a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Atlantic Foundation.
Photos 1 – 2: Rina Banerjee, IN MAKING AMERICA, 2020-2023, metal, rice paper, glass, sequins, cotton, horn wire, porcelain, turtle shell, silk thread, polyethylene netting, wood figure, silver leaf, 39 3/8 x 22 7/8 x 21 11/16 inches, courtesy of the artist, photos: Guillaume Ziccarelli; Photos 3 – 4: Rinja Banerjee, LADY OF COMMERCE, 2012-2023, hand painted, leaded glass chandelier, wood figurine, vintage glass bottles, chandelier ornaments, birdcage, steel, wood pedestal, lace, cowry shells, taxidermy deer paws, Indian marriage jewelry, ostrich eggshells, porcelain doll hands, silver leaf, gold leaf, wire, linen cord, marble baby doll hands, 120 x 48 x 48 inches, courtesy of the artist, photos: Guillaume Ziccarelli
