Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE's Visual Meditations
Sneha Shrestha, who goes by the street name IMAGINE, is a young artist who paints with the confidence and skill of someone who has been making art for a long, long time. Up close her brushstrokes move with the delicate power of flames. From a distance her compositions provoke questions and promote a sense of calm.
Imagine’s multi-story murals, gallery-scale paintings and more recent sculptures draw from traditions as varied as Himalayan religious arts, street graffiti, calligraphy, text art and graphic abstraction to forge a visual vocabulary that is both universal and highly specific. She reimagines and translates the energy of socially conscious public graffiti to storied (some might even say intimidating) collections such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MFA Boston, Facebook, Fidelity, and Google.
Her painting “Home416,” was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston – the first work by a contemporary Nepali artist to hold this distinction. And she was recently awarded a three-year Boston Center for the Arts Residency which provides studio space in the South End, a highly coveted prize for artists struggling to find affordable space in an unaffordable real estate market.
A view of Sneha Shrestha’s work gracing the entrance of the Cantor Art. Gallery at Holy Cross on the occasion of her first solo exhibition Ritual and Devotion, 2024. Photography by Jane Louie Photography.
““Home416”... speaks to the language and art of Nepal, to the street and public art landscape of Boston, and to the power of words and scripts to express fundamental human truths and needs.
”
Raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, Shrestha moved to the United States to attend Harvard University, leaving behind a family with whom she’s very close and a culture she loves. After school, she chose to remain in Massachusetts, a difficult decision which led to a grueling immigration process that took years and cost her “the most valuable thing in life - my time with family - so many pujas, jatras, purnimas, birthdays, Dashains, Tihars missed.” Those missed opportunities and the arduous, isolating details of her immigration journey became the inspiration behind much of her work.
Twenty paintings from “The Celebration Series.” Cantor Art Gallery, Holy Cross University. Photography by Jane Louie Photography, courtesy of the artist.
Sneha Shrestha, Dwarpalika II, 2024. Aluminum. 72 x 60 in. © Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE.
Shrestha told me the chances for her to have achieved such success — to have left Kathmandu, attended the top university in the United States, attained citizenship and found success as a professional artist are miniscule. 0.02% of the population left Nepal when she did. She is humbled by her life path and has spent her career creating work that acknowledges the paradox of the diaspora: sacrifice and longing for home mixed with gratitude, hope and the evolution of identity brought on by opportunity in the U.S..
Her work promotes community engagement and social discourse. How can Americans understand and appreciate more deeply the complex, nuanced, contradictory, agonizing and celebratory experience of young immigrants? How can art communicate feelings that cannot be expressed in words or behavior? Shrestha is, in addition to everything else, an educator. In Nepal she founded the country’s first Children’s Art Museum, and in Boston she is the Arts Program Manager at the South Asia Institute at Harvard
The artist with curator Mallory Ruymann celebrating the installation of Green Tara 2 at DivcoWest’s new lifescience building in Cambridge Crossing. Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a IMAGINE, Green Tara 2, 2023. Acrylic on canvas. 137 x 137 inches. © Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE. Photography by Mel Taing.
Seizing on its ability to capture and honor her Nepali culture, Shrestha began incorporating characters from the Devanagari script, a Brahmic script used in over 100 languages in Nepal and India and in the Sanskrit scriptures.
Whether she’s high up on a crane producing a mural for the side of a multistory building or in her studio creating pieces for gallery walls, Shrestha uses a highly disciplined breathing technique to align each stroke of her brush to a careful breath. Having watched her grandfather meditate as a child, she brings that personal respect for meditative focus to her work. There are 36 different letters, she explained when we met in her studio, and every letter is different. She uses her breath to ready her body to paint, and matches breath to brushstroke. In this way she creates her highly recognizable interpretations of the Devanagari script.
Currently, Shrestha’s work is on view at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago as part of the exhibition Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now organized by the Rubin Museum in New York, and at Abigail Ogilvy in Los Angeles. Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, which recently shuttered it’s SOWA Boston location to focus on guest curated shows in LA, worked with Boston-based curator Mallory Ruymann to mount the two person exhibition Rehearsal with artist Cicily Carew and IMAGINE.
Rehearsal features work from Shrestha’s “Celebration Series.” When I visited her studio a number of “Celebration” paintings hung on her wall. They are possibly my favorites of her body of work. Each painting depicts the name of an official immigration form the artist had to fill out over the course of her pursuit of American citizenship. The forms represent the bureaucratic hardships of the process, their names a mix of nonsensical numbers and letters . Many questions reduced human beings to selections from drop down fields. “Which box do I belong to?” she explained, thinking back on the pain of filling out the forms. “Each story is different. There are no ‘boxes.’”
Let’s talk about color. Shrestha has a bold relationship with color, drawing from Nepali celebrations, rituals and traditions. For the Celebration Series she used colors based on the outfits her mother wore to events that she missed, a powerful nod to the sacrifices made and the culture she misses. She collected photographs of her mother at those events and posted them in her studio for inspiration.
Installation views of Rehearsal at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery:
“Often the immigration process is a source of shame for immigrants, and they often don’t talk about it. I imagine a time when immigrants will be celebrated, and the immigration journey becomes something to celebrate. ”
Sneha Shrestha, “Untitled 12,” 2023. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas. 24 x 18 in. © Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE. Photography by Jane Louie Photography.
Sneha Shrestha, Untitled 15, 2023. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas. 24 x 18 in. © Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE. Photography by Jane Louie Photography.
Sneha Shrestha aka IMAGINE, “For Cambridge, With Love from Nepal.” Public mural commissioned by the Central Square Business District which depicts a line from a Nepali poem: “Success is what is in our hearts; not where we come from.”
IMAGINE and I met in her studio the day after Donald Trump won the presidential election. A pensive somber mood blanketed the South End neighborhood, but the artist was able to focus her attention on her busy gallery show schedule and thoughts about her work. Here is some of what we discussed (edited for length):
RH: You mentioned Rob Gibbs / Problak (Co-founder of Artists for Humanity) being an inspiration, demonstrating how graffiti could be a powerful form of artistic expression in urban areas. Something about graffiti attracted you and you started learning from him. Can you talk about why you were drawn to that style of painting and public creativity?
SS: I think this question would take up an entire book! Not sure where to start…I just really fell in love with graffiti and how it was started by young people out of rebellion in New York. Rob inspired me to think about what it meant for young people to want to be seen. I also loved the idea of letters as image. I was fascinated by this concept so I only went deeper to learn more.
RH: How has your artistic process evolved since then?
SS: I used to paint in English and now I paint in Nepali and I use mostly brush since I feel I’m able to express more this way… I use different types of flat brushes to create my calligraphic strokes. I use acrylic paints and inks for pigment.
RH: Your work is physical because your marks are often large and you have to get your brushstrokes right the first time. Can you talk about how the body contributes to meaning in your work?
SS: I see my paintings as visual meditations. How much pressure I put in the brush really depends on what sort of breath I’m taking in, so I think my breath and my brush strokes create my paintings. And meditation at the end of the day is a regulation of your breath, so you have visual meditation on my paintings.
Sneha Shrestha, Untitled 11, 2020. Ink on handmade Nepali paper, framed. 30 x 20 in. © Sneha Shrestha, a.k.a. IMAGINE. Photography by Jane Louie Photography.
RH: One reading of your work I’m interested in relates to literacy. You use characters from the Devanagari script, which is what is used in the Sanskrit scriptures and the Nepali language. You mentioned that you use this script because it is of your home, and it helps keep the culture of your home country alive here, in this country. But Americans cannot read this script. They do not know what your pieces “say” unless you interpret for them. In that way it seems to me you are mimicking the experience immigrants have here before they learn English, and even after, not knowing how to interpret American customs or practices unfamiliar to them.What are your thoughts on cultural and aesthetic literacy and how does your use of the Nepali language address gaps in cross cultural understanding and compassion?
SS: By [exposing people here] to the aesthetics of a different non-main stream culture, I’m taking over space and building on people’s cultural competency. I hope there’s curiosity and conversations that the work evokes.
RH: You recently started working in sculpture. Was this an exciting experience? Did it open up new ideas for future projects? Are you interested in continuing to explore sculpture?
SS: YES! Sculpture is a new medium [for me] that is so so so difficult to grasp, to plan, to fabricate and the logistics are all types of complicated…all this is SO EXCITING for me! With sculptures I’m exploring [creating] the same effect as my murals - how might I TRANSFORM a space or a mood of a place with my work? Next summer, I will be installing my first public sculpture in New York city in Queens!
Closeup of “Apsara,” 2024 Aluminum 182.88 x 152.4 cm. Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Jane Louie Photography.
RH: As a part of the Nepali diaspora in Boston, can you talk about how these questions might relate to your feelings of cultural pride being mixed with or tempered by a longing for home?
SS: I think one fuels the other! Being away from home for long periods of time really made me wonder about what EXACTLY I missed about home? I thought about the ESSENCE of home - what is it that I miss about home? It’s the cultural aspects I grew up with that made home feel like home and this is what I miss. And then a strong sense of cultural pride obviously makes me thing of home a lot so then I renew my sense of longing for home.
IMAGINE’s painting Everything Begins with the First Fetter, (2019, acrylic, aerosol, and pastel on cradled birch, 11” x 14”) is available through the Boston Art Review’s Art Sale.
You can find more about Sneha aka Imagine at her website and @imagine876 on Instagram.
Cover Image Photography by Mel Taing, courtesy of the artist and art_works.
