Join us at the Stanley Museum of Art for the 2025 Bette R. Spriestersbach Endowed Lectureship, featuring Siddhartha V. Shah, PhD, and John Wieland 1958 Director at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. 

Our Wounds and Our Weapons: Artmaking in India as Liberatory Practice, 1947 to Today

Independence from British rule in 1947 signaled the end of nearly 350 years of British occupation, leaving the people of India to grapple with tremendous trauma and the task of building a nation that was simultaneously ancient and new. Artists looked to the distant and more recent pasts to envision a bright but unknown future, and their marks - particularly in printmaking practices - reveal a yearning for personal and political liberation, as well as an ongoing effort to fulfill a precarious dream of equality, unity, and peace.

Siddhartha V. Shah is the John Wieland 1958 Director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. He was previously the Director of Education and Civic Engagement, and Curator of South Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum - home to one of the leading collections of modern Indian art outside the subcontinent. Shah earned his BA in art history from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a PhD in art history from Columbia University.  His academic and curatorial projects have been featured in publications ranging from The Times of India and India Today, to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today.

Artwork Caption:
Untitled (Gandhi)
2009
Somerset paper, woodcut
74 1/2 x 41 1/8 inches (189 x 104 cm)
The Waswo X. Waswo Collection of Indian Printmaking
2016.59 / 219.2015

Jagadeesh Tammineni (1988-)