Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik has exhibited, collaborated, and cooked in the US, Holland, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Mexico. These institutions include: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum of California, Southern Exposure, 826 Valencia, Stanford University, The Smithsonian APAC, the Future Food House in Rotterdam and MaD Asia.
Committed to equity and diversity in the arts, Sita has been the art features editor for Hyphen magazine, and a board member at Kearny Street Workshop. She has been a Fellow at the Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo, and an artist in residence at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny, Ireland and Denniston Hill in Upstate New York.
Sita is a founding member of the People’s Kitchen Collective in Oakland, California along with Jocelyn Jackson and Saqib Keval. Together, they produce community meals that narrate our shared struggle and resilience. The goal of The People’s Kitchen is to not only fill our stomachs but also nourish our souls, feed our minds and fuel a movement.
A recipient of the 2019 Art Matters Grant, a 2020 Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellow, and a Creative Capital recipient, she currently teaches in Diversity Studies at California College of the Arts.
books
We Make Constellations of the Stars
Pre-order here.
In this innovative rethinking of the artist monograph, Oakland-based artist, educator and activist Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik captures conversations with the people who shaped her creative practices and helped her map the tools that are most important to her: wonder, intuition, criticality and belonging. Bhaumik’s work has been celebrated by the San Francisco Chronicle and other media for using art as a strategy to connect memory and history with the urgent social issues of our time, as in her 2016 installation Estamos Contra El Muro / We Are Against the Wall, in which she collaborated with artists, makers and community members to recreate (and then smash) the US/Mexico border wall out of brick-shaped piñatas. We Make Constellations of the Stars interrogates not only what makes an artist an artist, but how connection is crucial for personal and political transformation as an artist of color.
Visionary and historian Jeff Chang (author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation) writes: “Thoughtful, engaged and bold, Sita Bhaumik stares down trauma, cruelty and injustice, but always leads us towards wonder, joy and hope. By drawing connections and making meaning of seemingly unrelated points of light, she reveals new pathways toward belonging and freedom for all. She is one of the most insightful and inspiring artists of our time.”