Reimagining South Asian Women Artist Archives through Transnational Feminist Networks: From Local to Global
This archive is dedicated to the histories of South Asian women sculptors born between the 1920’s -1940’s, who were paradigmatic in shaping South Asian Modernism. They were inspired by global art and culture combined with a resonance to indigenous crafts. These influences contributed to a worldly affiliation and internationalism to create a language of their own, using the third dimension. This archive intends to fill in the gaps and scarcity of South Asian Modern sculptural archives, an area that has been put on the back burner as compared to the large amount of scholarship available on premodern South Asian painting or classical Indian sculpture.
It engages with active pedagogy on queering archives to theorize against the grain: “To deliberately engage critically with whole bodies rather than static structures. Looking at embodiment as a process rather than a static state of being.”
This archive intends to view multiple materialities as an archive. Dorothy Berry helps to validate these multi-various archival structures to be “active agents” to highlight the ruptures and institutional invisibilities of Black history:
“….I finally asked, “If everything is an archive, what meaning does the word “archive” have? What is so great about being an archive? Why have we given the word such power?” What I felt, at least subconsciously, was annoyingly provoked, reflecting on the decades of labor my mentors, colleagues, and I have worked trying to unlock ignored Black history from institutional strongholds through whatever means institutional boundaries allow.”
In addition, feminist historian Gerda Lerner in her path breaking book The Creation of Patriarchy addresses how women have been delegitimized by the archival process in the ancient world, a pattern that has continued to this century. This archive uses these tools to fill this vacuum, by tracing the lineages of South Asian modern female sculptors.
A key object that is part of this archival project is a rare book Indian Sculpture Today, 1983, published by the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay. It is a catalog of the selected works of 29 Indian sculptors and eight painters participating in a group show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay in 1983. The book creates a composite image of Indian sculpture during that time. It highlights the biographical write-up and works of Pilloo Pochkhanawala (1923-1986), one of the only woman sculptors amongst twenty plus male sculptors within the framework of the book/ catalog.
Pochkhanawala was a pioneering multimedia woman sculptor belonging to the Parsi community of Bombay who traveled internationally in 1951, taking inspiration from Henry Moore, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Thus, Pochkhanawala embodies a sense of ecofeminism intersecting with the postcolonial in her multipolar, sociocultural art practice that also paralleled the Non-Alignment movement in the 1950's, where global world orders panned out in the form of the third dimension and abstraction. She broke away from excessive rationality into meditations of anti-enlightenment thought.
A cross-cultural intersection that this archive helps to navigate are parallel global feminisms in the 1970’s including archival photographs from a set of slides from the New England women's coalition, the women's liberation march and rally in Boston in particular, that are part of the Miriam "Mimi" Dale Pichey papers, (1964–2006).
Mimi was a Brown University graduate of the class of 1971. Her collection contains personal papers including correspondence, clippings, posters, bulletins, and artwork by her, all related to her participation in the Women's Liberation Movement and advocacy for abortion rights on the Brown campus, locally, and nationally. Essentially, this collection contains a bulk of materials dating from 1968 – 1972, paralleling South Asian women sculptural practices.
Mimi's records from Brown University in the 1970's can be woven with the sculptural practices by South Asian women to view such feminist knowledge production through a local, national and transnational lens running parallely during the same time period.
This archive also addresses the “un-findings” or invisibility of South Asian women artist archives at the Pembroke Center to acknowledge a lack of such art historical materiality and to petition for such acquisitions. Overall, this project contributes to creating archival collections based on South Asian modern art and acknowledging the lack of such organized archival records online.