This Pride Month, experience a slice of life from Houston-area artist Preetika Rajgariah in CAMH’s Instagram Stories.
About Preetika Rajgariah
Preetika Rajgariah is an Indian American visual artist who explores the complexities that arise when cultures intersect and creates work that expands how we think about an increasingly globalized world today. Through object making, video installation, and performance, she weaves together her unique life experiences as a queer, Indian born Texan, with culturally loaded materials to explore the ways in which an immigrant experience counters and aligns with a quintessential, classic American upbringing. Not only does her work transform ideas around traditional expectations of women in eastern western societies, but she emulates this decolonization and dismantling through her own body. Rajgariah invites viewers to pay attention to the nuanced differences between appropriation and appreciation, while also recognizing beauty in the in-between.
Rajgariah has attended residencies at Oxbow School of Art, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, and the School of Visual Arts, and she has exhibited at a variety of spaces such as Western Exhibitions and Roots & Culture in Chicago as well as Art League Houston, Lawndale Art Center, and Women & Their Work in Texas. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas.