Jackson Heights gets a new public artwork embracing the Nepali community
This week we welcome IMAGINE (aka Sneha Shrestha), an artist from Nepal who currently works in Boston and Kathmandu. She creates sculptures, paintings and public murals around the world that often incorporate her native language and blend the aesthetics of Sanskrit scriptures with graffiti art. Her distinctive style accentuates the Devanagari script — used to write languages such as Nepali, Sanskrit and Hindi — thereby creating meditative artworks that transform spaces.
A new art installation by IMAGINE in Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights, Queens titled “About a Living Culture” is on view through Jan. 1. The work was commissioned by the New York City Department of Transportation’s DOT Art program in partnership with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.
As a Jackson Heights-based artist and founding member of Friends of Diversity Plaza, I can say that this project set a precedent for a museum-commissioned public art project both in the plaza and in Jackson Heights in general. I interviewed IMAGINE on Sept. 5, when the work was first inaugurated. The sculpture was damaged a few days later and had to be removed for repair. It has just been reinstalled. The interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Have you been familiar with this neighborhood for a while?
My first time in Jackson Heights, I was like, Oh my god! Now every time I come to New York, I just have to come here. I have been here with my mom once; a lot of my friends have moved here as well. So over time it’s been in different contexts. My younger brother used to live here and work here, so I came to visit him a lot, and he would find a new Nepali restaurant every time. That’s how we bonded, really.
They keep springing up!
There’s a Newari place here, and it’s not just like basic Nepali food, it’s very specific ethnically.
Regional! When did you move from Nepal?
I came to the U.S. for college in Boston. After I graduated, I worked there for a couple of years and then I moved back to Nepal for about four years. I worked on founding the Children’s Art Museum in Nepal, and came back to the States for graduate school. After graduate school, I decided, wow, I really need to give this art thing a full-time try. I sat my parents down and told them, just give me one year. It has been eight years since, so, yeah!
And is that museum still there, the children’s museum?
So the museum – we had to close down towards the end of the pandemic because it was so difficult to run a nonprofit and still keep the staff protected. Sometimes some of the staff will still do online programming but mostly we weren’t able to sustain it and keep everyone safe.
Do you know other Nepali artists in this area?
Not right here, but I know Kobi Lama, who showed at the Rubin Museum as well. He lives in New Jersey.
And compared to here, what’s the Nepali community like in Boston? You still live in Boston, right?
I live between Boston and Nepal. I go there to spend time with family about half of the year, and then half the year I’m in Boston or somewhere in the U.S. working. The difference, I would say it feels like there’s room for so much diversity here. I get excited every single time. I feel like I blend in. I’m walking around in a sari, nobody’s looking at me twice. I love it.
Absolutely. So to me this area represents like a stronghold of immigrant power and it’s technically one of the most diverse places on the planet, which I really cherish. I was wondering how you feel about the vulnerability of immigrant communities in the current political climate?
I think all of us are worried. In a way, I think we’re taking the opportunity to get even closer to community, to form even stronger bonds. I think it is that sort of time where we see someone in need and we want to be there for them. I know that I’ve been leaning on my community a whole lot through these troubling times. And I think, with the sculpture too, it’s a first time for all of us, and by that I mean, it’s the first time for me doing a public sculpture, and the first time for the Rubin Museum to do a public sculpture and work with the city.
So I think within these institutions and organizations we’ve really come together to problem solve and at the same time also make sure that we’re keeping the artwork at the center of it, the meaning of it. So how can we solve a logistical problem while still keeping the heart of the art intact. And to make the sculpture as well. My team of friends in my community would really come together for that too. So it feels like an empowering experience to be building something so visible during this time. The sculpture is also meant to slow people down on their commutes, to just stop for a second and just take a moment to reflect regardless of where you come from. I hope it provides that pause because now more than ever it’s so important to take that moment to slow down, take a breather, appreciate something and then keep moving.
I read that the sculpture was an arch, but then when I saw it, it felt more like a screen, like a jali, like you would see in a mosque or in Islamic architecture. So I felt a connection there as well, just because I’ve spent a lot of time in Delhi and I really appreciate Islamic architecture.
It also reflects Newari sacred architecture, so a lot of our lattice windows have geometric shapes on them for privacy reasons. But the aesthetics of it is like these geometric shapes and then their arch-shaped windows in old Newari homes.
And are those devotional structures as well?
Sometimes they’re included in devotional structures. A lot of times, if you go to old parts of town in Kathmandu, they’re in old homes. People still live in those parts. So you see them in temples, you also see them in everyday homes that are really old. My parents grew up in one of those homes. And so I remember when the homes still belonged to our family, I remember looking out of those windows when I was little. And then as an adult, I’ll visit the same neighborhood and see those windows still intact. They’re pretty similar to these actually. The reason why you see it here is also because it’s so quintessential, like the Newari architecture. You see it here often. And so that’s what the arch and the geometrical patterns on it represent. The pattern itself is made out of the letter Ko, which is the first letter of the Devanagari script. A lot of my work is based on Devanagari script.
And that script is common to Hindi and Nepali.
Devanagari has been in regular use since the 7th century, you know, it’s such an important form of communication. However, there’s very little aesthetic appreciation for it. And for me, once I moved to Boston and I was introduced to graffiti, I started seeing, you know, words as images, and I thought, how could I bridge this with my culture in some way?
Barry McGee’s explorations of hand-drawn vernacular typography and street art comes to mind.
Yeah, I wanted to make that connection with the aesthetics of it and I’m obsessed with graffiti hand styles too. So my handwriting felt like it was my authentic way of sharing my culture. At the same time, I think one of the most important elements of the sculpture is the fabric on top that you see, the red fabric that’s sort of like fluttering in the wind. So the sculpture is about a living culture and it is an homage to the Himalayan diaspora’s living traditions, as in, we’re not just people of the past, we have this culture that evolves with time and we practice them in contemporary settings as well, let’s celebrate that. That’s what it’s about. So the fabric that you see usually adorns sacred structures and I had it made in Kathmandu in my neighborhood. My mom helped me source the fabric and the same tailor that makes them for temples made it to our specifications. My mom FedExed it to me and then once it arrived in Boston we had my best friend’s seamstress auntie make the little changes that we needed to attach it to the sculpture. I wanted that element to be the living part of the sculpture – by that I mean the rest of the sculpture is made out of powder-coated steel, which is fabricated. I wanted a part of the sculpture to change over time and that’s the fabric. Fabric is going to fade over time. It just moves with the wind.
Anything in Diversity Plaza is subject to all kinds of forces, trust me.
I think with it being outdoors, I wanted something of it to change with time because the idea of impermanence and change and bringing a community with you through all of that is so important. So the fabric is probably the most important part and the most difficult part to figure out and the piece that has been exchanged by many hands through continents, which for me is super exciting and going back to the idea of a community coming together to make something happen.
Did you connect with the community here in any way as part of the process of figuring out what you were going to do?
I know someone from the Nepal Chamber of Commerce, and his office is around the corner from Diversity Plaza. I was speaking to him and he was pretty excited about it. I got a scope of the location through him and how people use it, how people go through it. Because I don’t live here, I don’t have that kind of information. I visited but that’s different. Connecting to people who have businesses in the area was important to me, to not just make assumptions that like, oh, this must feel good for people, you know, I wanted something that really would belong here. Yeah, so I think I got that insight through that.
Even for myself, I’ve felt a strong shift towards wanting to engage, have my art engage with the public, and it almost feels like more impactful and meaningful having it outside of the gallery space. I know we’re running short on time. Who are some of the artists that you admire?
Oh, so many. Oh, my gosh. I’m out of tea now. Um…
When you were talking about having the fabric made by her family, I thought of Sagarika Sundaram. I don’t know if you know her, but she does a lot of work with fabric and fiber sourced from her ancestral home and wafting it into these abstract forms. I think she has work in the Armory Show.
Oh, cool. I’m going there tomorrow. You are so nice. Suchitra Mattai, she’s one of my favorite artists. She works with a lot of repurposed materials, like saris.
I know her actually! We’ve written about her, and Epicenter worked on a project that’s currently on view at the New-York Historical Society on the history of the sari. It includes her work.
Thanks so much for your time and congratulations on the project!
Of course!
You can see IMAGINE’s art installation in Diversity Plaza (near the Wendy’s) and see more of her work on her website and Instagram.
