Curator Talk: Cristin McKnight Sethi
The exhibition “Painted Poetry: Art of the Rajput Courts” explores paintings that emerged from several Rajput courts during the 16th to 19th centuries. Early paintings from Mewar and Malwa that use bold colors and angular forms. Later work from Bikaner, Bundi, Jaipur, Kishangarh, Kota, Marwar, and Sirohi that visualize emotional themes. Lyrical compositions from Bilaspur, Chamba, and Kangra that depict expansive landscapes and exquisite detail. Poetic texts describing Indian aesthetics, musical modes, mythology, and devotional Hinduism shaped the evocative themes and subject matter of these images. They invite us to revel in the arts of music, dance, poetry, and painting that shaped the lives of Rajput rulers.
Cristin McKnight Sethi is the guest curator of “Painted Poetry: Art of the Rajput Courts” and an educator and scholar with expertise in the art and material culture of South and Southeast Asia. She’s worked at several museums, including the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, the Museum of International Folk Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. Sethi has also held faculty positions at California College of the Arts, Colorado College, George Washington University, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In her research and publications, Sethi enjoys exploring archives and the role of museums in collecting and disseminating histories of art, connections between gender and practices of making, community-based traditions, informal craft economies, materiality, and postcolonialism. She is particularly passionate about the study of textile traditions that have historically been categorized as “women’s work.” Sethi is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota and currently serves as director of education at Textile Center.