This week we welcome Avani Patel, a Brooklyn-based artist from Mumbai, India. Patel immigrated to Pennsylvania with her family at the age of 11. She holds a BA from Penn State University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Her cultural background has had a profound impact on the forging of her identity as an artist.

As a young girl living in India, she fell in love with the patterns of dresses, bold colors, the sound of music, as well as the spectacle of both theater and cinema. They were all fluidly interconnected for her, effectively symbolizing the rhythm of daily life. Here, she continues to explore the boundaries between Eastern and Western cultural influences.

Her paintings have been exhibited in U.S. cities such as New York, Providence, Philadelphia, New Jersey and Chicago, as well as in Dubai, Panama, Portugal and Mexico. Patel was invited to the White House in 2005, alongside 50 other artists and gallerists. She worked on the public project America’s Chinatown Voices at Columbus Park in New York City, organized by the Asian American Art Center in 2008-09, where 300 panels illustrating stories of Asian Americans in New York were publicly displayed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibited two of her paintings from 2002 to 2008. She has been awarded residencies with Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Chashama Visual Arts and Triangle Arts.

“I make paintings inspired by nature, daily experiences, and India’s landscape. As a child, I was captivated by my mother’s garden and my sister’s vibrant costumes for classical Indian dance performances. In addition to abstract imagery, I often use fictional creatures in my work. I freely move between natural, figurative, and abstract motifs,” she writes.

“Sometimes creatures reveal themselves in the process of painting or drawing, influenced by my observations of nature and life-forms. Forms emerge from repetitive mark making, which also document the passage of time. I am constantly exploring new ways of expressing form and pattern. My goal is to share the joy I feel in creating these images.”
This art and artist survey is looking and sounding good. Keep up the great work! Change is in the air! P.T. Hazarika