Rina Banerjee (b. 1963, Kolkata, India) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BS in Polymer Engineering and worked as a research chemist before completing her MFA at Yale School of Art in 1995. She has held a previous teaching post in post-colonial criticism as part of the Yale School of Art and currently teaches in Columbia University’s art department. In 2020 she was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and in 2021 she was in residence at Art Explora, Paris, an international foundation established by Frédéric Jousset. She is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, NY. Upcoming and noteworthy group exhibitions include The Sky’s the Limit, National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023) and The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and in American Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum (2024), both Washington, DC.
Between 2018 and 2021, a major mid-career survey, Make Me a Summary of the World, which presented twenty years of Banerjee’s large-scale installation, sculpture and paintings, travelled from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC.
Other solo museum exhibitions include Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen (2021); Smithsonian, Washington, DC (2013-2014) and Musée Guimet, Paris (2011). Her work gained international attention at the 2000 Whitney Biennial and has since been included in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York survey exhibition (2005, 2015); the Venice Biennale (2013, 2017); the Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2015); the Busan Biennial (2016); Prospect 4, New Orleans, LA (2017); and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2018). Her work is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Foundation Louis Vuitton pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, amongst many others.