In the Studio: Rupy C. Tut

Rupy C. Tut is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed her about her work and creative practice in January 2025. The following is excerpted and edited from a transcript of that conversation.

My most important function as an artist is being a storyteller. In my work, the story begins with the materials, then it goes through the maker, and then it is presented to an audience. I use a limited palette of pigments, because I make them myself, and I tell the story through an alphabet of color where these mineral-based and plant-based yellows, oranges and reds are both bright and earthy. The work is filled with details, because every mark, every single brushstroke, is meaningful in the process. It's the gathering of those marks that results in the impression of the story I am telling at that moment.

My paintings often center a female protagonist—someone who is trying to either speak to power and a will to exist, as a female-presenting character, or speaking to an emotion of powerlessness emerging from lack of control. The stories draw on different things I have experienced as an immigrant kid, as a woman, as a mother—how to find power in less certain circumstances, how to maintain hope and find resources to survive.

I'm trained in the 18th-century Pahari painting tradition, which is part of the larger umbrella of traditional Indian painting. Pahari painting originated in a specific part of northern India. I fell in love with this tradition because of the way it spoke through a lot of natural elements—lush trees and landscape that are characteristic of that part of the region.

What also struck me about this painting style and tradition was the amount of care, respect, patience and labor that it takes to achieve a painting. Material is related so closely to the composition and to the artist’s intention that you're not really separate from the tools you're using. For example, the squirrel hair brush, a very specific brush I used in my traditional training and now in my practice, itself imparts a specific language of line changing in pressure and weight at the will and with the breath of the artist.

I think because there's so much care in the studio—in the making of pigments, applying of pigments, burnishing the paper before each new layer, constructing compositions—the final product is a very important remnant of all those processes. While I am in love with all these specificities and have a huge amount of respect for my traditional training, at the same time, when I bring them to my practice, my effort is always to make sure this technical knowledge flows from the past into the present to reflect current realities and living stories.

In my training, I spent years learning and practicing the face, the body, trees, and so on and so forth, so a lot of time has gone into building the hand memory that's needed to visually speak in this specific way. Now I invest my time in developing the language of the present and future as well—increasing the lexicon and building on the library of visual language that relates to my lived experiences.

For example, one of the things I’m going to figure out this year is how jellyfish would be painted using that same contour of the line with the distinct behavior of mineral based pigments. In many ways, I’m recognizing time and traditional knowledge are not linear, but circular, morphing to every painter’s individual expression and mark. While I don't want to challenge old traditions, I do want to achieve harmony and inclusion of more lived stories and perspectives as new traditions.

As a woman, and as a mother, I've understood the role of women in a significant way—the challenges, sense of community, and everything else that becomes intertwined in those two roles. If I didn't speak to the darkness and isolation along with the joys and wins that come with these roles, then I wouldn't be honoring my own womanhood and motherhood. And that's my artist-hood. If I tell a story that I feel very closely and very specifically, somewhere that story ends up touching multiple individuals at different levels.

One of my many motivations as an artist is to make sure history is somehow impacted through my work—that there's some sort of change or possibility I'm creating on that timeline, even if it's a very, very small speck. I've heard stories of how impactful the women in my family had been during the 1947 Partition of India, but their stories are not in history books. However, their stories are forever embedded into many of the characters in my paintings.

This idea of impacting history through my work is a really big ambition, but I think that’s a good thing about being an artist: You're a very active dreamer, and dreamers are often okay with thinking of really large, big, impossible things.

I currently have a show up at SFMOMA that I labored really hard on and poured my soul into. It is part of the SECA Art Award Exhibition, which is on view through the end of May. My section doesn't have a title, because it's part of a show for the three awardees, but if it had a title, it would be A Dream with Many Faces. Through solo exhibitions, I try to tell a story through multiple layers, like, what seeing the same person from multiple sides. This show is significant to me in the way that I've been able to access the many faces and sides of dreams and dreaming. In this show, dreams are like ancestors, guiding us through life, dreaming is an act of labor, and dreamers are beings of supreme power and will.

The painting The Dreamweaver (2024) is the beginning of this story. It honors the person who weaves dreams actively throughout their lifetime and does so as an act of survival against odds and difficult circumstances. The effort it takes to spin dreams and to live our lives guided by those dreams is not ordinary. This painting honors this extraordinary spirit and labor that dreaming requires from us all.

The Dreamweaver is someone resting, almost embedded, in a landscape. Pink mountainous details form the face, hands and feet of this person gently laying on red mountains. There's movement happening around this dreamer at all times, whether it's in the sky, in the rain, in the water, or in the deeper parts of the Earth's core.

This work underlines this notion that we are not really separate from our surroundings. It's about understanding we are part of a larger world, that we sometimes find ourselves to be the largest thing within our world or the most central part of our world. But in fact, we are part of a larger scheme of things—something we can only recognize where we are actually still.

In that context, The Dreamweaver understands they're part of a larger intention and they are just setting a small intention in place with a dream. I think it's a poetic way of honoring the dreamer, where their labor is seen as something that is so beautiful and expansive. The Dreamweaver comments on all these different aspects of our relationship to our environment, but also honors the person that weaves the dreams, because I think we often undervalue and trivialize that effort.

In this show, this is where that story of dreams begins for me. And what happens to those dreams, what happens to the Dreamweaver, is what the rest of the show is about.

One of my favorite feelings to create through my work is nostalgia, because it is a beautiful emotion to be able to survive with. My notion of personhood comes from stories of survival—from my family’s experience with Partition and growing up with bedtime stories my grandparents told of losing something they remembered for the rest of their lives. And then seeing my parents as immigrants, still reminiscing and thinking about things that never made it into their suitcases—like my mom’s college textbooks, her notes that she never found again. Or even me, moving to the US when I was 12, thinking of all the friends, the toys and all the little projects I must have done that I never saw again.

And so, nostalgia is an emotion that's dominated my understanding of what it is to be a person. Everyone around me tapped into their nostalgia as a way of accessing the places that they couldn't be in physically. So, for me, if the audience can find a moment of nostalgia that appeases that yearning to either go back to a place or go back to a different self or to go back to a certain emotion that is not physically accessible—if a painting allows them to sit with it—that feels very significant to me.

Related to this notion of accessing physical places through nostalgia, there’s a pair of paintings in the SFMOMA exhibition that are based on the architectural layout of my grandmother's home in India, in my mom's hometown. One is titled Beeji da Ghar, which is My Grandmother's Home, and then the second is titled Beeji de Ghar, which is My Grandmother's Home for Me. For me, this home is a fertile ground for dreams and to be still.

Through these works, I recognize and explore the intergenerational and even generational experiences of a home, and how a home becomes a character in our lives in so many ways. A home, as seen in these paintings, is a place of rest, a place to hold memories in, and a place to develop dreams within. However, this relationship to home varies between generations—as influenced by patriarchal limitations, economic freedoms, individual expressions of personhood, and overall relationship and expression of boundaries—all part of daily negotiations in the life of a woman.

And so, understanding the home as a character in either developing, encouraging, or limiting our dreams is why those two works fit so well with The Dreamweaver. I think it's important to start with hope, but it's also important to know the facts of the patriarchal limitations that some of us navigate to just be able to do what we love, hold onto hope, to dream, or to yearn for something more for ourselves.

My studio space is at the top of my house, with these slanted ceilings. It's not a space of meditative stillness, but rather a space of active labor. I often disagree with ‘meditative’ as a description of the nature of my mark making or repetitive movement of burnishing and pigment making. For me, contrary to stillness and surrender of meditation, my work in the studio is an act of labor that requires movement, sweat, and grit. It's an act conjuring raw determination, often that is stirring and very much in contrast to surrendering to stillness. The only surrender that takes place in my studio is a surrender to the material.

In my studio, I honor labor as my way of worship, so my studio is a space that is very sacred to me. Because of my background in biology and public health, my studio space is also quite clean. It's like a lab in many ways because I like to keep things very organized, often by year and by material.

At the same time, it's very important for me to know this studio space is part of my home where I exist as a part of my family. There are all kinds of noises of life and living happening below my floor. For me, life is not necessarily separated from work. In many ways, they reflect each other. So, I love being able to hear the clanking of kitchen dishes, my parents’ discussions about their walking route for the day, and my kids’ entering the home with roar and thunder when I'm up in my studio. Sometimes, the kids park themselves outside my studio door looking through the glass door like, "What's mom up to?" or leaving Post-it notes for me when I’m working. That's the beauty of having a practice that is built in a home.

The slanted ceilings don't really limit the size of my work because I work very close to the ground and all the work is painted flat on the ground. I like to say I live at the top of a mountain, but it keeps me very grounded. In that way, my studio space is perfect for the type of practice and work ethic I need to keep.

When I’m painting and preparing to paint on the ground, I take on a lot of traditional postures like kneeling or squatting or sitting cross-legged. In my grandmothers’ home, I have seen these same postures used to execute traditional patriarchal roles of cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. done solely by women. Now, these postures are such a big part of the way I make work, to express my individual worldview and ambitions. I now see these postures as power poses in my own way, linking me to my ancestors and to my own sense of land and ground. For me, sitting on the floor is very powerful.

I feel grateful to my practice for having brought sustainability into focus for me—whether it's conserving water or understanding the sources of the pigments I'm using today are eventually going to erode and not be around anymore. The wastage is very low in the studio because everything is cared for and intentionally prepared and reused, including water and pigments.

Another significant contribution of my practice to my life is the habit of observation of my surroundings. For creating works rich in natural imagery, I often leave the studio to notice and observe the overall expanse and existence of trees, birds, and animals. This pre-painting phase has now naturally transformed me into a more eager nature enthusiast, invested in learning about the current state of my natural surroundings—which trees are still around, which birds are still around, and what is threatened and needs assistance.

Right now, in my studio, I'm constructing and weaving a narrative for my solo show that will take place at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco at the end of the year, opening in November. It doesn't have a title yet, but it engages conversations with self, the pull and tug we all feel within ourselves as we navigate our lives. For this solo, I highlight specific characters and a specific natural language through which the characters will express their stories. The characters, their postures, and their bodysuits emote and interact with their specific environments and, in this case, also with other characters, to build a world where the self is rarely an upright mirror image of us but rather an inverted, challenging, and complicated depiction of us. In this solo, I strive to move horizontally to pull in more lived experiences of womanhood and motherhood as well as to weave in the natural world that exists right outside my doors and windows.

The paintings for this solo are significantly larger to allow for inter-character dialog, and also because I've come to the point where, with each work, it's my intention to take up more space.

For me, to show up every day to the studio recently has become an important act of self-recognition—that I have this maker in me, and that I'm a storyteller. I’ve always considered myself lucky and privileged to be an artist, and to be noticed as an artist, especially coming from an interdisciplinary background, with education in biology and public health, and not necessarily thinking I would end up in contemporary art or have my voice be amplified so much.

This year, I have felt a shift in my understanding and acceptance of the privilege to be heard as an artist, and I want to make sure that legacy, that voice, has a plan behind it. I've decided to make sure I not only respond to what's happening to me, my work, and my career, but I also have my own set of plans or intentions moving forward. It's a little bit of a shift in power.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Rupy C. Tut’s work at rupyctut.com.