The Collection

Suchitra Mattai is a Guyanese-American multidisciplinary artist of South Asian descent whose practice spans mixed-media painting, fiber work, sculpture, and large-scale installation. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, she grew up learning embroidery and sewing from her grandmothers before moving to Canada as a child, and later to the United States. Her great-grandparents were indentured laborers brought from Uttar Pradesh, India, to work the sugar plantations of Guyana under British colonial rule—a history that anchors her art in questions of migration, memory, and survival. Mattai holds an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, and she is based in Los Angeles.

At the center of her practice is an effort to recover voices that colonial history quieted. Working with vintage saris, found textiles, archival prints, and materials drawn from the domestic sphere, Mattai weaves together oral histories and family archives to reimagine the lived experience of the South Asian diaspora. Her work pays particular attention to women's labor—the acts of stitching, weaving, and tending that carried culture across oceans—and treats these materials not as craft but as testimony.

Mattai has presented solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the ICA San Francisco, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City, and her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the São Paulo Biennial, the MCA Chicago, the ICA Boston, the MCA San Diego, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among others. In 2024, she co-produced the Hindi-language short film Anuja, which received an Academy Award nomination. She was awarded a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2025, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2023, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2023. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, and others