In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Oakland based painter Rupy C. Tut.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with India-born, Oakland based painter Rupy C. Tut.
About Artist Rupy C. Tut:
Rupy C. Tut is a painter dissecting historical and contemporary displacement narratives around identity, belonging, and gender. As a descendant of refugees and a first generation immigrant, Rupy’s family narrative of movement, loss, and resilience is foundational to her creative inquiries. Tut's artistic practice expands, innovates, and reframes the traditions of Indian miniature painting. She mixes her own pigments and turns to hemp paper and linen to contend and make visible one’s place in the world.
Rupy C. Tut lives and works in Oakland, California. Her work has been presented through exhibitions and talks at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; London City Hall; Stanford University; The Peel Art Gallery and Museum Archives, Toronto; a solo exhibition Rupy C. Tut: A Recipe for Brown Skin at the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara; and a solo exhibition Rupy C. Tut: Search and Rescue at Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Rupy C. Tut is represented by Jessica Silverman.
Visit Rupy's Website: RupyCTut.com
Follow Rupy on Social Media: @RupyCTut
For more on Rupy's current & upcoming exhibits:
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
Artist Rupy C. Tut: [00:00:00] If there's a teenage version of me that walks into the museum and my work is there, is it going to change her decision to pursue art? Is it going to help her imagine that her story, the story of her mother, her grandmother, is significant enough to be captured in a work of art? That was a big goal for me.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Rupy C. Tut on her work featuring women like herself.
Welcome to Art is Awesome. The show where we talk with an artist or artworker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area, and I wanted people to know about them.
So I came up with Art is Awesome.[00:01:00]
When she was 12, Rupy C. Tut moved with her family from Punjab in India to Los Angeles. She studied pre med at UCLA and planned to work in public health, but she had a studio practice and decided to pursue art. In 2020, a piece of hers got accepted to the De Young Open, and now she has a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Or ICA San Francisco through January 7th, starting in January, her work will be in group shows at both the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
I first talked to Rupy in 2022 when the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired pieces by. 30 contemporary artists, including one of hers, The New Normal. I loved that piece and the thoughtful way she spoke about it. To record this podcast, we met at Rupy's studio on the third floor of her house in Oakland, where she [00:02:00] lives with her husband, three young children, and her mother and father. Rupy says she's always loved making art. And she remembers a 5th grade assignment to paint her mom.
Artist Rupy C. Tut:It didn't look like my mom, of course, but at the same time, I remember just that excitement and the joy of being able to just sit there and do it for the entire art period.
Host Emily Wilson: Rupy went to UCLA, which was close to home. She was pre med and studied evolutionary biology. She also minored in South Asian studies and learned about art and literature.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: Because of the exposure to early Indian art, I was looking at these body forms that were very specifically designed. There were certain parts of the body were accentuated, you know, whether it was hips or breasts or just even the female body form. was so different from what I would see in any contemporary art, even art appreciation classes.
It was just, of course, very specific. And then it led to me searching through and finding, okay, what do the paintings look like? And [00:03:00] of course, I should have been doing my like chemistry homework at that time, but, or my reading organic chemistry or something, but this is what I was doing instead.
Host Emily Wilson: Rupy moved up to the Bay Area after she got married and started looking for public health jobs. But she kept painting during that time.
Artist Rupy C. Tut:I was like, okay, let me just keep my studio practice up. I was um, Always painting even at ucla, you know every summer. I was actually doing art internships versus lab internships so it was obviously actively a part of my life. When I ended up starting a studio practice, using the, you know, the extra bedroom to have my paints out and keep doing things, I realized that, okay, this is something that can be fun.
I probably still don't want to do it for, you know, living, but just eventually having that work be seen by others and then, you know, People wanting to acquire it and things like that. I was like, okay, this can work. There was no real fear about it. Like I never was concerned. Oh, how am I going to make money?
Or how am I going to get successful? It was more about do I even want to do this? [00:04:00] It was a very personal inquiry and also a very personal decision.
Host Emily Wilson: Rupy committed herself to art.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: I like to say that I didn't want to do other things. It's how I discovered I wanted to do this, you know, but there is a kind of this and it maybe comes from immigrant culture, but there is this willingness to work really hard at something, like day and night. And that was the question I asked myself. Can I work on this day and night? Do I see, envision, can I see that happening? And I could. And that's probably what felt like it was the reason.
And also the other thing was, a very important thing at that time, whether it was my grandfather, whether I read somewhere that, You know, whatever you end up doing, just be really good at it. Like, just be excellent at it. And I was like, can I be excellent at it? Maybe it's the artist's ego in me. I was like, I can be really good at this.
I can do it. So somewhere, you know, that, that naive belief in yourself really, um, made that decision solid and [00:05:00] felt like, okay, yeah, I can do this because I can be really good at it. And then eventually things get added on. Like, okay, I can be really good at it, but can I really change the world with it? Can I really impact people with it?
Like a video game, I kept adding harder and harder levels to it for myself. Like, now can I do this? Can I, now can I do this with it?
Host Emily Wilson: In 2020, Rupy's work was one of thousands submitted by artists in the nine Bay Area counties to be in the de Young Open, a salon style show at the museum. Getting accepted changed things for her.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: The work was highlighted and I was on a panel discussing the work and being asked these really layered questions about it. I had to submit a write up for one of the works that, that is now at the Asian Art Museum. Just going through that write up and trying to see. And I remember this moment exactly, and this was in 2020, and I was pregnant with twins at the time.
And I'm formulating this write up, and it's a write up for the larger Bay Area audience. Earlier it was more, I was showing my work for diasporic audiences. And this was when I was imagining [00:06:00] just anybody looking at it. And to know that this is this write up represents me when anybody looks at it and it's not someone who's culturally specifically looking for how is this person this or that in any certain way.
So that was a big moment for me because all of a sudden I was like oh my voice is going to be available to everybody.
Host Emily Wilson: Like David Huffman, the guest on the last episode, Rupy's work was acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The painting, The New Normal, is a triptych showing two women wearing scarves.
One represents the forest, and the other, the ocean. They're gazing at a tree surrounded by fire, with snakes twined around it. In January, she'll have work in group shows at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It's significant to Ruyi that her art will be in major museums.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: If there's a [00:07:00] teenage version of me that walks into the museum and my work is there. Is it going to change her decision to pursue art? Is it going to help her imagine that her story, the story of her mother, her grandmother, is significant enough to be captured in a work of art? That was a big goal for me.
And in that way, I feel that's true now. Because you see women who look like me, my mother, my grandmother, and the trees that we grew up around, the way we relate to water, the way we relate to land, the poetry of belonging that we have grown up with is within the work at this point, but also the work being in these, you know, larger platforms or these larger institutions allows for that voice and that story and that those characters to be amplified so much.
Host Emily Wilson: Out of Place at the ICA has to do with the environment, the will to belong and hope.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: I was trying to carve out work that was going to be about me more, like about the [00:08:00] everyday me and not about maybe my grandmothers who had this beautiful story of heroic struggles through partition and maybe not even my mom who's been this immigrant mom who's worked so hard is a superhero, right?
I was like, no, I want the story this time to be story that I can relate to more. It's a story of everyday people, everyday, you know, what are these acts of heroism that I participated in every day. Every single day I wake up with some sort of hope, even though I'm still exhausted when I wake up, right? because of the life I have. And that's the story I wanted to carve out. But at the same time I wanted the story, because it's a local institution that I'm, that I was showing at, I wanted the story to be about the land, about the place that I'm in. So it had to be about living here as a Bay Area artist. As a, you know, inhabitant of California landscapes.
That's what I was like, okay, my language and my expression for this show is going to be those landscapes. And those, um, original emotions and the origin of the sentiments is going to be these [00:09:00] characters. Who are then going to be very, very large. I wanted the works to be very large. Because I fell in love with these brown women taking up space, even on museum walls. And I was like, why not? That that's just so wonderful to see.
Host Emily Wilson: The show starts with the work Portrait of a Woman, a painting of a pregnant woman, hands resting on her belly, wearing an orange suit that's covered with eyes.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: But the show developed slowly and then morphed into, you know, having these characters, which is this not struggle to belong this time, but no, I belong here and I wake up every morning to want to belong here and this is how I create my belonging that I not only find myself in my works, you know, which is that one work where it's a portrait of woman where the woman is pregnant and is it's about putting my vulnerability into the open as a mother and using, you know, a vulnerable body of a woman, which is most vulnerable at the stage of pregnancy and mirroring that vulnerability that I also feel whether I step into the world or even when I step into the art world, you know, as a mother of three [00:10:00] children, and also as someone who is constantly trying to be productive of whether it's my body, whether it's my heritage, whether it's my womanhood, but at the same time also trying to be as adventurous as I can be, and also trying to be as strong and as expressive as I can be about my very specific identity of these multiple things that make up me, which is like, you know, being an immigrant, being a woman, being a mother, um, being an artist.
Host Emily Wilson: Lots of labor goes into Rupy's paintings. She mixes her own pigments and sources her own paper. Rupy went to London looking for a person to study Pahati painting from. And she found a master in this style, Dr. Susana Marin. She went to London once a year for eight years to study with her.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: She's made me want to care about the pigments, right?
Where you listen to them, where you feel them and you touch them and you understand them. And I think that respect for surface, that love [00:11:00] for the pigments and for the entire visual form as well. Like, the face has been done this way since centuries, or. the way the pigments are applied. It's been done this way for centuries.
I think love and respect has definitely been deep rooted in the teaching that she has done with me. It wouldn't be that I would be with her for a long time, but every year for the eight years that I've trained, I would go and be with her for a week or two weeks, and then the rest of the year I was practicing what I had learned.
One year was deers and horses, and one year was a face, and one year was just the figure, like prominently mostly female figure, right? The male figure's got it. Some time, but, and then one year was obviously doing pigment, but then also learning trees and then one year was water. So, and this is like a whole year that I would then sit in my studio and be practicing and practicing and building hand memory.
Host Emily Wilson: ago. A few months Jessica Silverman's gallery started representing Rupy, which means a lot to her.
Artist Rupy C. Tut: It was a phone [00:12:00] call that then afterwards, uh, a lot of crying pursued. Career wise, of course, it's beautiful to have a wonderful team of allies to rely on. And as an artist, you get used to dreaming alone. And it's so great to have a team of people who dream with you and are there to support those dreams and support those crazy ideas.
Host Emily Wilson: At the end of the show, I asked the artists to answer three questions. They are, when did you know you were an artist? What's a work or works that made an impact on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Rupy C. Tut: I think I knew I was an artist probably when somebody else told me you're an artist. Yeah, I've always relied on the belief of others to believe in myself in that way.
You know, an impact for me means that I love to marvel at it, right? I just love to stare at [00:13:00] it. And this is something that I recently discovered that I love to marvel at the way that all the textile work, like all the textile, or the things that my grandmother's woven and all the things she's embroidered, and I have spent minutes and hours just kind of stroking those, uh, embroidery threads, trying to understand how her hand moved. Uh, because, you know, I had this separation with my grandparents after I moved to the U. S., I didn't really see them, there was no FaceTime. So, somewhere I think I'm trying to feel touch.
So I really just marvel at the things she's made, because they are so beautiful also, but how did she make these? which were woven and she would do them once a year and how that was part of her life practice. I definitely marvel at that because that is also the only artwork that I have hung in my house.
The most creatively inspiring space for me in the Bay Area is actually museum cafes. [00:14:00] I love going to museum cafes. Something about eating at a museum cafe, having tea there. I mean, I can tell you this, I'm obsessed with museum cafes because no matter which country I go to even, I love going to museum cafes and I love having a piece of cake and tea, whether it's, you know, in all the cafes in the Bay Area museums that now my work is in, I used to just be a frequent visitor to their cafes. I could probably tell them what menus they had every year. And I will say this too, like when I had my first kid, the baby was really small, but I would take the baby with me to the museum cafe.
That's what I was like, no, we're going to do this. If nothing else, like there were no mommy and me dates, but it was a museum cafe where I was. And even now, if I imagine like a chill day I'll have as an artist, I was like, I would love to be sitting in a museum cafe and pondering over a work that I've just walked by.
Bed Music:
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening to Art is Awesome. And thanks to our guest, [00:15:00] painter Rupy C. Tut. Her show, Out of Place, is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco through January 7th. Rupy's work will also be in a group show. Into View, new voices, new stories, at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, opening January 19th, and on view through next October.
If you're in LA, you can see Rupi's work in another group show. I will meet you yet again. Contemporary Sikh Art, opening January 28th and on view through May. Please subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. The next episode would be January 2nd, but we're taking a small break, so it will be on January 16th.
Happy New Year. I look forward to being back in 2024, talking with some great artists, as well as curators. And other people who work in the arts.[00:16:00]
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with a Compotech music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.[00:17:00]