Rina Banerjee Appointed Inaugural Post-Colonial Critic at the Yale School of Art

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce that Rina Banerjee has been appointed the inaugural Post-Colonial Critic for the Fall 2022 semester. An MFA alumna who has been a visiting critic at the School in Painting/Printmaking since 2020, Banerjee will join MFA students across the four areas of graduate study for critiques, lectures and museum walk-throughs, all executed through a post-colonial lens.

As part of her engagement, Banerjee will be joining the School of Art for three visits during the Fall semester, in a new interdepartmental position supported by the Cross-Cultural Curriculum Fund. “Rina approached me with this idea and I considered how she could have the most impact on students and faculty,” Kymberly Pinder, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean, shared of Banerjee’s appointment. “The critic’s role in art school is to assess an object and then provide questions about it that deepen the artist’s inquiry into what they are doing and its impact. Each critic has their lens—which is why we offer so many perspectives to our students.”

Rina Banerjee lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kolkata, India, lived briefly in Manchester and London before arriving to Queens, New York. Although Banerjee has been living in the United States for 50 years, she still draws the perception that she is foreign and other. Drawing on her multinational background and personal history as an immigrant, Banerjee’s work focuses on ethnicity, race, migration and American Diasporic histories. The artist’s sculptures feature a wide range of globally sourced materials, textiles, colonial/historical and domestic objects while her drawings are inspired by Indian miniature and Chinese silk paintings and Aztec drawings.

In 2018 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art co-organized the artist’s first solo retrospective Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World featuring 60 works of sculptures, paintings, and video. The retrospective’s North American tour includes exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles ending at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville Tennessee in 2020. Banerjee has also exhibited internationally, spanning 14 biennials worldwide like 57 Venice Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, and Kochi Biennial. The artist’s works are included in many private and public collections such as the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.