Suchitra Mattai had a big 2024, with four solo exhibitions and a number of group shows. This year Mattai momentum continues with she walked in reverse and found their songs, which opened at San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art last year and will move to the Seattle Asian Art Museum from April 9 to July 20. The artist will also debut a major installation at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 22.
Visitors to the Seattle Asian Art Museum will be immersed in Mattai’s colorful, richly patterned world of repurposed fabrics and cleverly altered designs. The Guyana-born, Los Angeles–based artist, whose ancestors were brought from India to Guyana by the British to work as indentured laborers, literally weaves strands of Indian and Guyanese culture—and the memory of colonialism—into her pieces.
In she walked, Mattai takes found needlepoints and tapestries with classic European designs and gives them what she calls a “brown reclamation,” surrounding them with colorful swatches of fabric—often from vintage saris—or making the very European figures in them look Indo-Guyanese. A reimagining of her grandparents’ house in Guyana sits at the center of the installation
Mattai wove together saris sourced from friends and family across the US, Guyana, and India, for Pappy’s house, 2024, a re-creation of her grandparents’ Guyana home.
