CalArts Appoints Ranu Mukherjee Dean of Film/Video

Photo: Taylor Johnson

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) announced the appointment of Ranu Mukherjee as Dean of its School of Film/Video. Mukherjee, who comes to CalArts from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, begins Aug. 15.

Mukherjee brings 30 years of experience as an artist and educator to her role as dean of the largest of CalArts’ six schools of visual and performing arts. Currently a professor and chair of Film at CCA, she was previously on the faculty of CCA’s Graduate Fine Art Program, where she served terms as chair and assistant chair. Prior to moving to California, she spent eight years on faculty in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. 

In announcing the selection of Mukherjee following an international search, Provost Tracie Costantino said, “I’m delighted that Ranu is joining CalArts to lead our prestigious School of Film/Video at this critical time. She brings deep experience as an artist, teacher, mentor, and administrator to this role, as well as extensive and thoughtful work in pedagogy, cultural critique, and multidisciplinary artistic practices. I’m delighted to have her as a colleague.” 

“I am thrilled to be joining CalArts, a community of artists whose history of radical pedagogy and visionary artwork has long had an influence on me,” added Mukherjee. “The way the School of Film/Video holds together distinctive models and resources in an environment of personal choice, to support students’ vision and creation, is endlessly inspiring—particularly in this moment when the critical role moving images play in the culture at large cannot be overstated. As someone with a deep interest in the relationship between cinematic, visual, and performing arts as well as critical thought, I am also very excited to work in dialogue with the deans of all of the schools that make up CalArts.”  

As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Mukherjee works with animation and choreography, painting, textiles, installation, and performance. She connects questions around ecology, time, diaspora, and the experiences of women to the history of futurisms, speculative fiction, and ruptured colonial legacies. She also takes an ecology-based approach to pedagogy and leadership, informed by living questions and a focus on open dialogue, collective health, and artistic innovation. 

Mukherjee’s extensive international exhibition and screening history includes projects at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, and Karachi Biennial (2019). She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco/New York, which published her first monograph, Shadowtime, in 2021. Recent honors include an Artadia Award (2023) and a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship (2019). 

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Escalette Collection at Chapman University, Orange, California; JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the San Francisco International Airport, among others.  She is one of the co-creators of 0rphan Drift, an artist avatar making combined media works since their formation in London in 1994.

Mukherjee trained in painting and experimental film at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and earned her MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. She serves on the boards of directors at the San Jose Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, and Bridge Live Arts and is the proud mother of 17-year-old triplets.

Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors

Ranu Mukherjee, bitter skin, 2023, pigment, ink, crystalina, and UV inkjet print on silk and cotton sari fabric on linen, 72 x 72 inches

Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors
GALLERY WENDI NORRIS OFFSITE
September 6—October 7, 2023

New York, NY: The themes and concerns alive in the work of Ranu Mukherjee and Alice Rahon cross generational boundaries and offer viewers the opportunity to consider ideas rooted in nature, materiality, and transcendence. Alice Rahon and Ranu Mukherjee: Time Warriors presents artworks that examine issues of migration and identities, our changing landscapes and environmental concerns, across history and into the future. 

On view in New York City September 6 - October 7, 2023 at 529 West 20th Street on the ground floor, the exhibition includes approximately 20 mixed media artworks spanning the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, depicting how both artists innovate across media to further investigate their themes.

“Beyond presenting the work of two artists who I admire and am proud to represent,” said Wendi Norris, “Time Warriors invites audiences to explore the way their work, from different perspectives and across generations, shares ideas and themes as an open conversation. It is striking how both Rahon and Mukherjee experienced a world in immense turmoil and have harnessed this energy to create deeply poetic and personal explorations of time and expression.”

In the case of Rahon (b. Chenecey-Buillon, France, 1904; d. Mexico City, 1987), she utilizes sand and the earth as well as found objects in many of her compositions, and famously refers to herself as "a cave painter," having delved back in time and through her experiences with indigenous cultures in Mexico to render uniquely timeless, stylistic compositions. 

Mukherjee (b. Boston, 1966) similarly explores the changing environments. Using the forest as a means of expressing connection with nature and time, she innovatively prints present day mass media images from climate change and feminist protests onto jamdani sari fabrics that are collaged into her paintings, often appearing as hybrid or invented groves of banyan, aspen, or black cherry trees.  

Both artists take inspiration from India, Indian culture, and concepts of being and time. Rahon’s first volume of poetry was published in 1936 upon her return from a sojourn in India with fellow poet and artist, Valentine Penrose. Many of her poems and paintings address nature and mysticism, as well as the duality and union of humanity and nature. Mukherjee draws from her ancestry in India, poetically utilizing sari cloths as her canvas, investigating the transformation of its material as well as the multiplicity of ideas in her layered images.

Rahon once described a process of hers as “a type of enchantment, like the development of photos in a tray—little by little, the forms emerge.” Likewise, Mukherjee utilizes a layered process of printing on textiles and then putting them down in the color fields. “While my compositions are very planned out, it is also like printing in a darkroom and watching the image emerge,” says Mukherjee. “The chemistry between the printed patterns and the fabric and then the colors and images in paint is really exciting and the process often seems magical.”

Time Warriors is on view September 6 - October 7, 2023 at Gallery Wendi Norris, 529 West 20th Street ground floor, New York City.

Artadia Awardee

RANU MUKHERJEE | ARTADIA AWARDEE

2023, San Francisco Bay Area

JURORS: Christine Koppes, Jennifer Inacio, Jordan Stein, Matilde Guidelli Guidi

“Mukherjee has an impressive command of various mediums, working in a hybrid of collage, painting, and film cohesively to tackle topics of colonization, climate, and time through compositions of plants, minerals, bodies, and objects – such as furniture made with exploited materials – that come together in a distinct visual landscape.” – Juror Christine Koppes, Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, ICA San Francisco.

Ranu Mukherjee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles, de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design;  the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco ; the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA. Her most recent hybrid film installations have been presented by Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, the 2019 Karachi Biennale  and Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in numerous international group exhibitions. Awards and honors include a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020);  Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2024); an 18th Street Arts Center Residency, Los Angeles (2022); Facebook Artist in Residence (2020);  de Young Museum Artist Studio Program (2017); the Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (2014); and a Kala Fellowship Award and Residency, Berkeley (2009). 

Ranu Mukherjee’s collage-based paintings and film installations cultivate ecological, somatic, feminist and multidimensional perspectives on time, energy and power emerging from ruptured colonial legacies. Working with pigment, digital pattern, sari cloth, choreography and animation, she brings together South Asian, European and American references and materials that mix, converse and interrupt one another to create creolized visual languages. Depictions of tree, plant, flower, mineral, human and animal bodies, as well as furniture, microphones and other industrial objects, come together in fields of luminescent color, reconfiguring relationships and picturing differently tuned worlds.

ranumukherjee.com
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Come Undone

COME UNDONE

Suné Woods & Ranu Mukherjee

Curated by Marc Mayer

This presentation of the viewing room places California-based artists Ranu Mukherjee and Suné Woods side by side to highlight how each artist employs collage and layering as a strategy. The aim is not necessarily to just build an image, but to reveal the fragmentation, even fracturing of the world, society, family, and our bodies and minds. Come Undone features artworks that subtly uncover some of our vulnerabilities –environmental catastrophes, lack of access to health care (and care more broadly), political division, and troubled histories– which continue to cut us up. Yet, Mukherjee and Woods also call up sensuality as a bodily reminder of our capacity to love, feel, and move forward. This strategy does not recuperate loss or put things back together, but it demonstrates the resilience and power needed to forge new paths forward.

Come Undone, Galerie Barbara Thumm Berlin

Come Undone, Galerie Barbara Thumm Berlin

The exhibition opens a dialogue between the artist's videos;
Suné Woods, Falling to get here
and
Ranu Mukherjee, Succession

Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

New Viewings

Art and Transcultural Negotiation


26 Home and the World.jpg

Panel Discussion: Art and Transcultural Negotiation

Asian Art Museum San Francisco, September 26, 7-8:30 PM

with Mike Arcega, Margo Machida and Weston Teruya

in conjunction with the opening of Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa