About
Trisha Gupta is a contemporary artist, community activist, and educator. Her work is heavily influenced by her Indian-American heritage and explores themes of social inequality, colonialism, mental health, and immigration.
After being trained in the Western tradition of woodblock printing, Gupta returned to her home in Rajasthan to learn about Indian Woodblock carving. In particular, she learned about Indian block printing with natural plant-based dyes. She specializes in using natural pigments derived from traditional Indian plant sources to create colors that are used in her prints, paints, and dyes.
Trisha is committed to preserving traditional folk art and fine Indian printmaking so she’s made it a part of her practice to teach Asian printmaking processes like Indian woodblock printing, Japanese woodblock, and viscosity. She has taught with the Smithsonian, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking workshop, and Yellowbarn.
She believes in art as a platform for social change. As an Occupational Therapy candidate at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, she has taught art to diverse populations in schools, homeless shelters, and off Rikers Island. She previously ran the Studio In Sight program for Cornerstone Montgomery and is honored to continue to teach and represent a variety of artists living with mental health issues. She has also run events at the Sandy Spring Museum and VisArts, in partnership with Amnesty International. Her ongoing project, A Table for Everyone, hosts community dinners and public art projects to introduce new immigrants to the community.
Currently, Gupta is pursuing her graduate degree at MICA from the Mount Royal school. Her work is listed in the New York Public Library collection, the Art students League, and in collections internationally and domestically. She currently runs a communal studio out of Burtonsville, MD.
Artist Statement
As a multidisciplinary artist, all of my work is rooted in the concept of neurodivergence. As a neurodivergent immigrant woman, I returned to my art halfway through my medical degree to express narratives outside of a clinical context. Having trained as an occupational therapist with a strong background in art therapy, I glean concepts for my artwork from my clients. My clients have experienced incarceration, mental illness, neurological disorders, and physical health problems. Their stories are emblematic of the social norms that result in disparities and unjust outcomes. These disparities are used to inform my paintings, sculptures, prints, videos, and textiles.
My personal studio work is focused on prints, soft sculpture, installation, and other media that often depict body parts or architecture. For example, in my collagraphs and fabric work, my pieces are often informed by medical diagrams. I layer and combine delicate and transparent materials with dense and solid objects. I sometimes use intricate paper cuts, and on other occasions, use spontaneous found objects to show a balance between traditional and modern, trash and treasure, and synthetic versus organic. This results in intricate objects that represent flora, fauna, and the physical structures of the body. In contrast, my architectural work has an ethereal Asian aesthetic that depicts a sense of longing to find belonging.
Most of my work relies on a strong Indian palette. I often naturally dye my fabrics and create milled pigment inks. Vermillion, turmeric, indigo, and black iron pigments are distilled from plants, and powdered by employing the split lake dye pigmentation process. These four colors are heritage colors that are achieved through the distillation of mordants, dehydration of plants and the milling of pigments. I use yellow to represent turmeric and the soothing of pain. Indigo depicts brown and black skin, and divinity and ethnic darkness. Lighter shades of indigo depict medical blue. Vermillion depicts femininity. Each color is like an anthem that all these narratives share, in which an individual expresses power by being themselves and acknowledging their diversity.
I am also a community-based art activist whose projects work with participants over time to help them process loss, facilitate healing, and to collaboratively create public art. The process of creating the artwork involves the participant as a collaborator to explore narratives that critique socially complex issues like racism, sexism, and incarceration.
As my art practice evolves, I have embraced the role of a storyteller - a socially engaged one. These tangible works bring awareness to hidden experiences narrated by people outside of the bell curve. Ultimately, I aim to bring compassion and justice to marginalized groups.