sukanya rahman

Sukanya Rahman was born in Calcutta, India. She studied painting at the College of Art in New Delhi and at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris on a French Government scholarship. She also studied dance at the Martha Graham School in New York. Her entrance into the world of visual arts has followed a circuitous route starting with a career as an Indian classical dancer. 

She has exhibited her work in select galleries from Chelsea and Soho in New York to New Delhi, India, including Art in General, Bose/​Pacia and Gallery Espace. Her work has also been exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art, NY, the Arts Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA , and is part of the permanent collection of The William Benton Museum in Storrs, CT.

Rahman’s digital assemblages and mixed media constructions are juxtapositions of the multiple layers of her own life. Her works explore the complex and often contradictory perceptions of Indian womanhood and the contrasting perspectives of humor and spirituality, ancient and modern, East and West. Vying for center stage, and often in conflict, are Hindu gods and goddesses, Indian movie stars, political figures and American cartoon heroes. Choreography, theatre, narrative, elements of the vibrant popular art of India and American pop images creep unconsciously and insidiously into her work – a coming together of fragments of scattered images and memories: a collision and a reconciliation of her two worlds and cultures.

Her memoir, Dancing in The Family, first published by HarperCollins/​India, has been hailed as “a gem in the history of Indian dance.” She and her playwright husband, Frank Wicks, live on a Maine island and have two sons and two grandchildren.