On a brisk night in Worcester, Massachusetts, artist Beatriz Whitehill and I trekked to see “Sneha Shrestha: Ritual and Devotion” at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross. The exhibition is the first institutional solo presentation by the artist who is best known for her large- scale murals and street art under the alias IMAGINE.
With the rush hour traffic, it felt like there was a pressing. My mother always said, “There’s a blessing, in the pressing,” which meant that spiritual resistance meant that you are about to experience the dose of exactly what you need. Many things almost kept us away, but we knew they were merely distractions from getting what we needed through art. A beacon on Holy Cross’s campus, Shrestha’s mural called out to us from behind the glass like a pink horizon. There’s a reason that she’s dubbed the “Nepali Sanskrit Calligraffiti Queen.”
Inside the gallery, Shrestha was dressed in her mother’sbeautiful cobalt blue sari — just one of the many saris that informed the artist’s latest body of work on view inside the gallery. All of her work is dedicated to her mother, who supported her throughout her immigration journey to the United States. Around eight painting series of works are on display and two works of sculpture — one in a vitrine and the other as the centerpiece of the show. It is a combination of old and new work but displaying them all together. The on-the-wall gestural mark-making makes this exhibition unique. This retrospective looks at bodies of work that conceptually have been forming for the past 10 to 15 years.