Statement
Rujuta Rao’s practice spans sculpture, installation, book art, and social practice, alongside a parallel practice of conceptual and functional garments. Her work is research-driven and personal, using material investigation to explore migration, place, family history, and hospitality. While largely conceptual, it examines the role of artworks and publications as sites for communal gathering and community building, and how sharing art can be an act of hospitality. Informed by Jane Bennett’s notion of "thing power," she explores how objects, whether artworks, publications, or beverages, actively mediate human relationships. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, she considers hospitality as a framework to approach borders and migration. Her practice is informed by her own migratory living, shaped by global movement and adaptability, and often articulated through the metaphor of mangroves, their habitats and patterns of dispersal inspired by the coastal landscape where she grew up in Goa, India.
Her participation in residencies globally has contributed to a body of work that is often site-responsive to exhibition context. During her residency at the Center for Book Arts (2024, New York), she published the artist book On Solitary Viewership, structured to support her reading disability. The book draws connections between mentorship, bondage, and agency. She also began her BAR series, participatory installations inviting audiences to experience a menu of artist books and beverages across a bar counter, fostering dialogue through collective learning. This series focuses on her research into the indigenous Goan beverage cashew feni, its colonial history, and her family’s migration to Goa. During her Bemis Center residency (2025, Nebraska), she created portable bar structures that expand into interfaces for interaction. This mobile quality, which recurs across several works, echoes the migrations of plants, techniques, and people, including her own, and facilitates accessibility.
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Bio
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Born in Goa, India, in 1989, Rujuta Rao received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Parsons School of Design, New York (2014), and her BFA in Sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (2011). She is a certified Japanese Sake Adviser through the Sake Service Institute International, Tokyo, and a sake sommelier candidate.
Residencies, fellowships, and programs include the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE); SOMA Summer (Mexico City); The Here & There Collective (NY); Center for Book Arts (NY); NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (NY); Asia Art Archive in America’s Leadership Camp (NY); CCA Islands Travel Fellowship (Japan); and the Civita Institute Fellowship (Italy), among others.
Rao’s work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY); Experimenter Gallery (India); Printed Matter / St. Marks (NY); Center for Book Arts (NY); Anthology Film Archives (NY); The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (NY); Tufts University Art Galleries (MA); and New York Live Arts (NY). She was a participant in the State of Fashion Biennale 2024 (Netherlands).
Her works are held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New School Archives and Special Collections, and Center for Book Arts in New York.
Rao lives and works in the New York metropolitan area and is a recipient of the 2025 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship.
