Bhasha Chakrabarti
Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu) is an artist who has been based in Honolulu, New Delhi, New York and now New Haven. She 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. By crossing many genres, she engages art-making as a mode of discourse and her work generates dialogues between subaltern tropes and feminine forms of labor from the Global South and the agendas of resistance movements of marginalized communities in the Global North.
Chakrabarti graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022. She 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). She has been an artist in residence at the Ekard Residency in the Netherlands in 2024, the Hampi Art Labs in India in 2023 and the Fountainhead Residency in 2020. Chakrabarti was 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.
Courses
Spring 2025 Courses
LAEL 1082-01
NARRATIVES OF GLOBAL TEXTILES: IDENTITY AND LABOR IN PROCESS
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course explores the tangled histories, patchworked mythologies, and the global (im)possibilities of textiles in the modern world. The textile histories covered will spiral through the 18th to 21st centuries, and, through individual case studies, will consider narratives of identity, labor, and process they express well beyond their regionality. Rethinking the “History of” survey model, we will investigate how deep research leads to holistic perspectives as we uncover global networks of knowledge-sharing embedded within specific “regional” textile crafts.
These narratives will unfold from objects selected from the collections of the RISD Museum that will be made available for consideration and study at close range with curators. The firsthand experiences will be guided and enriched by guest lectures and workshops by visiting scholars and artists whose work centers on the particular histories examined, as well as field trips. Through active engagement with tangible objects and exposure to a plurality of voices, students in the course not only will gain an embodied understanding of the global (im)possibilities of textile histories, but also will find space for moving through and beyond colonial inheritances.
Textiles Students can be pre-registered by the department.
Elective