In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Ranu Mukherjee, a painter, textile, and film installation artist.
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 Ranu Mukherjee, a painter, textile, and film installation artist, who was recently appointed as Dean of the Film and Video School at CalArts in Los Angeles. Ranu discusses her background, her collaborative work with choreographers, and her latest project designing a curtain for the San Francisco Ballet's 'Cool Britannia'. She shares insights into her inspirations, including forests and their literary forms, and her early experiences that led her to become an artist. The episode concludes with Emily's regular segment, 'Three Questions', discussing influential works and inspiring places.
About Artist Ranu Mukherjee:
Ranu Mukherjee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2022-2023) de Young Museum, San Francisco (2018-2019); the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design (2017); the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016); the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL (2016) and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA (2012), among others. Her most recent immersive video installations have been was presented in Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, the 2019 Karachi Biennale (2019) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016) as well as in numerous international group exhibitions. Mukherjee has been awarded a 2023 Artadia Award,a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020); a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (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). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Escallete Collection at Chapman University; the 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.
In 2021 Gallery Wendi Norris released Shadowtime, a major monograph on Mukherjee's work over the past decade featuring a conversation with author and climate activist Amitav Ghosh, and an essay by Jodi Throckmorton, curator of Mukherjee's first solo museum exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Mukherjee co-created Orphan Drift, a London-based cyber-feminist collective and avatar making combined media works since 1994. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally including in London, Oslo, Berlin, Oberhausen, Glasgow, Istanbul, Vancouver, Santiago, Capetown, and the Bay Area.
Mukherjee received her B.F.A. in Painting, from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA in 1988, and her MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK in 1993. She serves on the Board of Trustees at the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Board of Directors at Bridge Live Arts. She is a Professor and Chair of Film at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
Visit Ranu's Website: RanuMukherjee.com
Follow on Instagram: @RanuMukherjee
For more on 'Cool Britannia' at the San Francisco Ballet - CLICK HERE.
For more on Ranu's book, 'Shadowtime' - CLICK HERE
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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
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 102. 5 FM every Friday at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artists, You can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: Recently, I got really into this idea of connecting with imaginary forests because the forest is a place that has so much to do with our breathing and our survival and all of these things.
And so, I wanted to think about how forests also exist within us as a literary form that we all know in this very primal way.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Ranu Mukherjee, the guest on this episode. of Art is Awesome.
I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting [00:01:00] such great people that I created this bi weekly podcast to highlight their work.
Ranu Mukherjee is a painter who also works with textiles and film installations. For years, She has taught at San Francisco's California College of the Arts. Recently, she became Dean of the Film and Video School at CalArts in Los Angeles, along with being in permanent collections, including at the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, and DeYoung Museum, and Kadist in Paris, as well as in San Francisco. There's a book about Ranu's work, Shadowtime. For a while, she's also worked with dance. That has led to her designing the curtain for the San Francisco Ballet's upcoming February 13th through 19th presentation, Cool Britannia. [00:02:00] The title, a pun on Rule Britannia, comes from a period in London in the 90s.
Ranu lived in the city then. Going to grad school and co curating Orphan Drift, a cyber feminist collective. We met at her Dogpatch studio, and Ranu told me about feeling that a portal opened while she was working on a painting in college, incorporating light, form, and plants into her curtain design for the ballet, and how she started working with acclaimed choreographer Hope Mohr in 2017 for a public program.
At San Francisco's Gallery Wendi Norris.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: Hope came and we talked and I showed her the work and she made a short piece responding to the work in the show. And after that we were like, okay, we need to work together some more. So over the years we've done several projects together and then. The collaboration seems to be getting deeper and deeper, which has [00:03:00] been fabulous.
Host Emily Wilson: She and the choreographer think in similar ways, Ranu says.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: That whole philosophy of foregrounding how we think through our bodies and think somatically and then express that is part of what we connect over. And also she's very interested in visual art and the relationship between visual art and dance.
So to work with someone who really learns from visual art, and she is now a visual artist also herself, doesn't make these really huge distinctions between these forms, and is always looking for kind of a new way to push the form. Rhino
Host Emily Wilson: worked with dance when she co curated a feminist collective in England.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: Orphan Drift is an avatar that I began with three other people in the mid 90s, 1994, in London, and it [00:04:00] was during a time where technology was really changing the world as it is now. So it was like a moment where you could tell that something major was going to happen. We were also really questioning the sort of star system of the art world at the time I was just getting out of my MFA in London and I think all of us were sort of questioning this thing of feeling like people were talking about the people more than the art.
I think we were thinking a lot about what does it mean to make images collectively. And also to own images collectively, we were really influenced by electronica and the kind of white label culture that was prominent in London in the nineties of, you know, just people sampling and that sort of culture and also working with sort of polyrhythmic music.
Host Emily Wilson: Ranu is the second artist to design a curtain for the ballet. The first was Maria Guzman Capron, a guest on episode 23 of this podcast. Claudia Schmuckli, the curator of contemporary art at the Fine Arts [00:05:00] Museum of San Francisco, showed Rano's work to the director of the ballet, Tamara Rojo.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I think there was a sort of realization that I'm somebody who has been working with dancers for a while, really interested in the moving body, and also had a history of living in London at that time.
Host Emily Wilson: Rana wanted the curtain to represent the three pieces in Cool Britannia, Chroma, Within the Golden Hour, and Dust. She says they reference color, light, and form.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: What struck me was It's very edgy ballet, right? So it's got a modernist edge. It's there's a lot of angular movement. There's a lot of minimal treatment of the sets.
And for me, that's interesting because I'm not a minimalist by nature as a painter. But I loved the combination of angular and fluid movement. And I've been working a lot with plants in my paintings and thinking about plants as these ultimate makers of form [00:06:00] because they make form out of light and they make infinite amounts of form.
So when you look at a plant, you're, you're, you're feeling that because they're like, they produce form through light. And I feel like dancers also do that. So there's this sort of. airborne aspect of watching dance that you feel really elevated by it because it's sort of doing something formally that a body doesn't do an everyday level a lot of the time and then mixed in in a ballet like this There are these kind of everyday movements
Host Emily Wilson: The third piece, Dust, also references World War one and labor.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: it's super edgy, it's really phenomenal and the dancers kind of come into these collective formations and then also use these gestures that reference labor and the war effort, and it's very, very powerful.
Host Emily Wilson: Plants, part of the curtain design, have a connection there as well.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I started to do some [00:07:00] research and found out that part of the war effort was for people to grow plants for medicinal uses because there was a medicine shortage. And so there was like a popular movement, like a mass request for people to just grow different kinds of plants that would Help to make medicine most of these plants being nightshades that are actually poisonous But they're also medicinal and so there are things like belladonna that we know of is this like witchy plant But it's also was used at that time to make medicine So many of the plants in the piece are from that plants that were used to make medicine in World War one All of the elements in the piece are floating in this This blue, deep blue space that I wanted to feel really like this kind of infinite space. Some of the staging that I looked at in the recordings that they gave me where there was this just big black space in the back that dancers go in and out of and it turns [00:08:00] dark and light. So I wanted to also reference that space because this, the, the format of the thing is this rectangle that mimics the staging.
Host Emily Wilson: Ranu started learning about plants after researching forests.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I was thinking about how to connect with our relationship to the natural world, right? Because I read this book by Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement. And The Great Derangement is a book that talks about climate change as a crisis of imagination.
As well as nature and thinking about how the epic dimensions of what's happening in literature have been hard for like people who kind of were trained or practicing kind of Western modernist literature, which really focuses on the individual and the everyday. I've been, you know, thinking about the same thing in artistic terms, like how to connect with the epic scale and the everyday at the same time for many years. But more recently, I got really into this idea of connecting with [00:09:00] imaginary forests because the forest is a place that has so much to do with our breathing and our survival. And then it's like a place of indigenous struggle and all of these things.
And so I wanted to think about how forest also exist within us as a literary form that we all know in this very primal way. Also, depending on where you're from in the world, a forest is a different thing in your imagination. I feel like as an artist, some of the things that I can do is really foreground working with the imagination.
Host Emily Wilson: Growing up, Ranu liked making things, but she didn't consider being an artist a job.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I made lots of collages and stuff and block designs and, but I didn't really know until my senior year of high school that you could be an artist or that art school was a thing. And I discovered that through the college fair in my high school cafeteria because there was this woman who looked totally different than everybody else in the room and I was really curious [00:10:00] about that, who she was and what she was doing because I was kind of unexcited about going into an academic college environment. And then I spent like the whole year in the art room just kind of developing a portfolio and stuff.
Maybe it was my junior year now that I'm thinking about it. It must have been.
I had this experience my first year where I was doing the all the electives that you do in a foundation program and I was painting a still life. And something happened where the paint did something, where I felt this thing that happens when you make a painting, where the painting kind of takes over and it starts to speak to you.
And also it feels like, I don't know how else to describe it, but it feels like it makes a hole in the universe or something. It makes like a portal. And that really happens when you're painting, but that was the first time that it happened to me. And I was like, what is this? This is [00:11:00] Unbelievable. So that, I was hooked. I was totally hooked after that.
Host Emily Wilson: Painting became her primary medium, but she also made films. She went to London's Royal College of Arts and studied both.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I found actually the discourse in the film program more interesting than what was being talked about in the painting area at that time at that school.
And so I got really into thinking about Film and also the dialogues around sort of post colonial dialogues around film. And so then I went to graduate school in London, the Royal College of Arts, and continued to study painting, but also got really into making video work. And that's how Orphan Drift came about.
Host Emily Wilson: Ranu has been teaching for years in London, at CCA, and now at CalArts.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I like working with artists. I like working with young artists and I see students as young artists that are just like earlier in their experience of being artists, but you really Learn people who work with young artists, learn from them as much as you teach them, I [00:12:00]guess.
And yeah, I like to see what other generations are doing and what speaks to them as people who are starting later than I did, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, it's just about being around artists, I think.
Host Emily Wilson: This is Three Questions, the part of the show where I ask the guests the same three questions. I want to know when they knew they were an artist. Some work that's had an impact on them and the most creatively inspiring place for them in the Bay Area.
Artist Ranu Mukherjee: I could answer that question in so many ways. I think that that moment when I was painting that still life and that thing happened, where I felt like the painting was talking back to me and I had like opened up a hole in the time space continuum, space time continuum, through the paint [00:13:00] was a moment where like art kind of found me, I guess.
There's so many. I think that Octavia Butler as a writer was really important to me about in her way of dealing with otherness and making me understand that I could, that it was a generative thing to feel like another. So that was a really big one. There's this book of Indian mythological prints that was in my house when I was growing up.
And that was probably my first real sort of some sort of transcendent experience looking at work. The luminosity of those images were really important to me. fascinating to me because they felt so different than everything else in my house. And also they really reminded me of the TV screen. I was watching a lot of TV as a kid.
So those are two things I think in terms of contemporary art or more contemporary art. One of my really early influences was Nancy Spiro. Her collage work was really important to me as a sort of feminist collage maker. The way she worked with scrolls and form and, [00:14:00] collaged images from different periods of history and women's history and the treatment of women.
So that was an important influence, early, early influence.
I'm going to have to say it's here. I mean, I love taking long walks with friends in the Bay Area all over the place. I love walking on over. Ocean Beach, so of course it's that, but I think that when I come into my studio, my shoulders relax and I feel like home somehow in myself. And I also really love the view here.
So it's this east facing light and looking out over the bay. And it's not necessarily beautiful, but there's all of these shipping containers and things that describe a lot of things about where we are.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you so much to Ranu Mukherjee, this week's guest on Art is Awesome. She designed the [00:15:00] curtain for the San Francisco Ballet's Cool Britannia. It opens February 13th and runs through the 19th. And thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. Please follow the show and rate us. We'll be back in two weeks with guest Daisy Nam, the chief curator of San Francisco's College of the Arts Wattis Institute.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of GoToProductions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9am and 7pm. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music.[00:16:00]
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at artisawesomepodcast or visit our website. Till next [00:17:00]time.