The world is her seashell: Rina Banerjee at PAFA

Rina Banerjee speaks to this moment when globalism collides with colonialism, emigration with cultural identity, race with class, gender with sexuality. She was born in Calcutta in 1963, grew up in London, and now lives in New York City, having transitioned from a career as a polymer research chemist to an internationally renowned artist. Her work is the subject of Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).

In the hands of an artist

Organized by PAFA and the San José Museum of Art (SJMA), Philadelphia is the first stop for the retrospective. Fifty-nine sculptures and works on paper inhabit every room of the Landmark Building, initiating conversations between past and present. For instance, A World Lost (2013), Banerjee’s cartographic meditation on the Asian diaspora and climate change, unfolds among early American visions of exploration.

A commentary on manual labor includes an 1851 sculpture of Odysseus’s long-suffering wife Penelope, who endlessly wove a burial shroud, and two 2017 Banerjees that are a triumph of handwork in cowrie shells and shining purple beads.

All the works here are handmade to an extraordinary degree, explains Jodi Throckmorton, PAFA curator of contemporary art, who shared curatorial duties with SJMA’s Lauren Schell Dickens. “Rina has had her hands on every single piece [during installation]…. She’s been here for six weeks.” Banerjee doesn’t distinguish between “fine” art and “crafts,” believing the craft in her art broadens her audience.

Summarizing the world (really)

There’s no easy way to understand Banerjee’s work: It’s abstract in form, wide-ranging in subject, personal in outlook. Her sculptural components include masks, architectural drawings, light bulbs, steel mesh, tiny soldiers, Charlotte dolls, a Liberty Bell, a sari, shells, mosquito netting, a fabricated alligator skull, and more feathers than a Mummers string band. Sculptures sparkle, rustle, and float — making you want to touch, but don’t: Curious fingers can satisfy themselves with samples in the Morris Gallery.

Can Banerjee’s titles — epic poems as long as 179 words — help? Throckmorton says they’re “a jumping-off point.... They’re poetic, freeform, and not necessarily didactic. … She uses idiosyncratic spelling and grammar to call attention to the worldwide domination of the English language.”

The full name of the work for which the exhibition is named is: Make me a summary of the world! She was his guide and traveled on camel, rhino, elephant and kangaroo. Dedicated to dried plants, glass houses-for medical study, vegetable sexuality, self-pollination, and fertilization her reach pierced the woods, country by country. (2014). It’s a marriage of parasols, cowrie shells, silk flowers, epoxy buffalo horns, lead soldiers, and glass prisms, and it focuses on traveling for understanding.

Pioneering preparers

Banerjee’s lavish paintings could illustrate origin tales of sinuous chimeras with boneless limbs, expelling breaths of flowery amoebas across kaleidoscopic universes. Her creatures are diverse in genus and hue; they have fingers, toes, hooves, hair, and horns.

“Rina hasn’t seen some of these works in 20 years,” Throckmorton says. And since Philadelphia is the first of five stops for this exhibition, some components required cleaning, repair, or replacement, making assembly tedious and time-consuming. Take Me, Take Me, Take Me to the Palace of Love (2003), a lunarlander-sized Taj Mahal in pink plastic wrap, took five days. To help future installers, Banerjee and PAFA staff prepared a detailed guide. Throckmorton needed just three words to sum up four years of planning and mounting the exhibit: “It’s been intense.”

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World runs at PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building (118-128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia) through March 31, 2019. For more information, call 215-972-7600 or visit online.