08/28/2026
Help us welome Purvai Rai to our Artist in Residency program! She will be here for 6 weeks, and will have Open Studios on September 19th as part of our 5-Year Anniversary Celebration and on October 3rd!
Link in bio for more information
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Purvai Rai is an artist, researcher, and educator whose practice engages Punjab as an evolving social archive shaped by extraction, labor, memory, and repair. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, textiles, sound, video, and artist books, she investigates how soil, water, food systems, architecture, and governance shape relationships between land, labor, and community.
Through long-term fieldwork, oral histories, archival research, and collaboration, Rai applies an interrogative methodology extending the dialogues on contemporary archaeology where her material knowledge treats Punjab as a living archive with personal narratives intersecting a thinking visuality of broader histories of colonialism, Partition, migration, environmental change, and cultural inheritance.
Alongside her studio practice, she has taught and lectured at Yale School of Art, CEPT University, and Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Photos Courtesy of the Artist