Suchitra Mattai is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist of Indo-Caribbean descent. Working across textile, sculpture, painting, and installation, Mattai draws on memory, family histories, and the legacies of colonialism and indentured labor to reconsider how histories are constructed and preserved. Vintage saris, embroidery, beads, and found materials recur throughout her practice, connecting diasporic experience with traditions of women’s domestic and creative labor. Through processes of weaving, assemblage, and transformation, Mattai reclaims materials already embedded with personal and cultural histories, creating new mythologies that foreground migration, resilience, belonging, and the experiences of women across generations.
Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Selected solo exhibitions include she walked in reverse and found their songs, ICA San Francisco, San Francisco, CA (2024); Myth from Matter, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2024); Bodies and Souls, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL (2024); We are nomads. We are dreamers, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2024); and Breathing Room, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID (2021).
Selected group exhibitions include Textiles as Monument, The Fowler, Los Angeles, CA (2026); Forecast Form, the MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL, (2023); In the Adjacent Possible, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2023); Breakthroughs, the MCA Denver, Denver, CO (2023); Fragments of Epic Memory the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON (2022); State of the Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); and Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019).
Mattai's works are represented in the permanent collections of LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Delhi, India; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, among others. Notable private collections include the Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM, the Perez Collection, Miami, FL, and the Shah Garg collection, New York, NY.