Sruti Suryanarayanan is a researcher & craftsperson who makes work about the soft edges of violence and the administrative work of resisting it.
Sruti is a weaver, an auto-theorist, and (thus) a pickler, interested in the administrative, domestic, and maintenance arts of cultural organizing against extraction and alienation.
At present, they are writing about how caste shapes South Asian American discussions of justice and democracy across the political spectrum as part of their work at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Sruti is also an Artist Organizer at Art.coop, a collective that exists to grow an arts/culture movement rooted in solidarity by centering artists and cultural workers making systems-change irresistible.
Sruti is currently thinking about logics of victimhood, balancing the books, wingnuts, and by-laws.
This website builds directly off the websites of Sruti’s community members, Emma Werowinski, Or Zubalsky, and Caroline Woolard.
Hover over the shapes to see images; some images can be clicked to be seen in detail.
This site is best viewed on a desktop or large screen.
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Research
May 2022 to January 2023
Intergenerational Participatory Action Research
Gender-Based Violence in Asian American Communities
With the support of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and AAPI Women Lead, I worked with 15 other individuals from community groups and organizations across the U.S. and U.S-affiliated islands to conduct community-driven research, focusing on gender-based violence against Asian and Pacific Islander women, girls, and non-binary communities.
✦ See a lecture I delivered on "Weaponizing Care" here.
May 2021 to January 2022
Spirits & Logistics: How Grantmakers, Universities, and Arts Institutions Start Working with the BIPOC-Led Cooperative Movement to Build the Future of Art Education
Art Students’ Labor & the Solidarity Economy
Spirits & Logistics is a report on the futures of art-based learning in co-ops that I worked on with Caroline Woolard, Dan Taeyoung, and Luana Marques Soares as a part of Dan & Caroline's work with AmbitioUS.
✦ Read Spirits & Logistics: How Grantmakers, Universities, and Arts Institutions Start Working with the BIPOC-Led Cooperative Movement to Build the Future of Art Education here.
February 2020 to May 2022
South Asian Americans Leading Together
Interpersonal & State Violence in South Asian Americans’ Lives
At South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), I helped research strategies and issues for advocacy (both in grassroots and political spaces) reflecting on issues of caste, immigration, hate violence, Islamophobia, and queerness as they relate to the South Asian American diaspora.
✦ View collaborator and Healing & Justice Researcher Katha Sikka's work on non-profit relationships with transformative, reparative, and healing justice here.
✦ View a publication from the Urban Institute on "Centering Race and Structural Racism in Immigration Policy Research" that was produced in alignment with a workshop I participated in on September 20 & 23, 2021 here.
✦ Read coverage of my research on Hindutva at SAALT by Nitish Pahwa at Slate here.
✦View SAALT's report Unequal Consequences on the impact of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on South Asian Americans via Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review here.
I regularly produced pieces for SAALT that reflect on issues of caste, immigration, hate violence, and queerness as they relate to the South Asian American diaspora.
✦ View a fact sheet and zine I made that provides an overview of trends in South Asian migration along the U.S. Southern Border here.
✦ View a Campus Workshop Guide I made on combating Islamophobia and hate in college spaces here. View my pieces reporting on Islamophobic and xenophobic hate incidents in the U.S. here.
✦ Find SAALT's work on the Internet Archive here.
Dia Art Foundation & The Teas
Artists’ Care Economies (& Extractive Institutions They Oppose)
October 2019 to October 2021
Alongside Alliah George, Angeles Fitzpatrick, danyele brown, and Eric Padró, I studied the role of arts institutions in building sustainable communities within Dia Art Foundation's Education Department.
I also collaborated with Fellow danyele brown to launch her tea line, "The Teas", which resists and challenges the pharmaceutical industry’s abuse and exploitation of trans communities by offering recipes for teas and tings in solidarity with the T- and titty-averse. The Teas are non-pharmaceutical supplements for male to female (MTF) hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and other trans-utilitarian remedies.
✦ Read a piece I wrote for Dia's blog about my work with danyele and The Teas here.
✦ Find The Teas on depop here.
March to August 2019
Center for Complexity
Art Students’ Labor & Extractive Institutions
On Reparative Justice & Expanding ‘Social Equity & Inclusion’ is a report detailing research conducted on the Center for Complexity regarding its relationship to racial justice movements happening within its parent community at the Rhode Island School of Design.
✦ Read The Future of Food, in the Round here.
✦ Read On Reparative Justice & Expanding 'Social Equity & Inclusion': Social Justice Beyond Talk in Academia here.
September 2018 to May 2019
artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio
Labor & Arts Institutions
This digital publication documents my year-long thesis endeavor to study my relationship to labor and productivity within the contexts of my university community. artifacts is a meditation on the relationships built with and between people, environments, and the objects when care is given and denied. I use this collection of actions, performances, and portraits to construct a subjective and semi-biographical narrative concerning racialized and gendered labor politics within maker/artist/designer workspaces.
✦ artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio is available upon request.
September 2018 - May 2019
The White Pube Speaks
Alternative Art Worlds
Alongside student organizers as part of our research on alternate art worlds, I curated a visit of The White Pube to RISD where they talked about the role of institutional critique in arts universities, visiting with student activists in their studios.
✦ Read about the visit here.
✦ Watch The White Pube’s blog on their visit here.
Interference Archive
Artists & the Left
From 2021 to 2023, I worked with other community members at Interference Archive to do educational programming and exhibition support.
✦ See a blog post about a collaborative zine made with Radio Al-Hara and Musicans for Palestine from 2023 here; see the zine itself here.
✦ See zines we made for Halloween on abolition here.
✦ See fruits of a valen-zines workshop from 2022 here.
✦ See an exhibition we produced on the Zapatistas here.
September 2024 to Today
cutwater: Insurgent Scars, The Wake, Economies of Suffering
South Asian (American) Studies
cutwater is an ongoing research and writing effort that seeks to metabolize dominant caste affect and theories of woundedness to articulate how Genocide Studies scholars could approach evolutions in fascist violence and ideology, namely through analyses of American Hindutva and South Asian American diasporic organizing. cutwater has been presented at the 2026 APARRI Conference; an earlier version of it won the Graduate Student Paper Award at CUNY’s Center for LGBTQ Studies.
As part of my Master’s work on Hindutva and genocide, I also work with Professor Anaar Desai-Stephens to convene a study group called “Deciphering Hindutva”. This is part of a work assembling a broader coalition of South Asia “studies” which collectively deepens understandings of Hindutva as a powerful ethnonationalist political project that has made strategic use of visual and sonic aesthetics to become a naturalized common sense in contemporary India and the South Asian diaspora.
✦ Find coverage of our public gathering at AAARI here.
May 2022 to Today
Art.coop
Artists & the Solidarity Economy Movement
In 2022, I began working full-time at Art.coop, alongside Ebony Gustave, Marina Lopez, Robin Bean Crane, Lydia Blankenship, and Sissy Rosso. Together, we facilitate a where artists get money, ideas, and tools to strengthen their communities as stewards of economic justice.
My work includes overseeing the Remember the Future Fellowship, our Power Tools for Artists series, our Currency House Residency, and, most recently, our Solidarity Economy Arts Directory, which maps 300+ cultural efforts resisting extraction and building solidarity (and access to the resources and tools they use as members of the Solidarity Economy).
✦ Listen to our podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
✦ Take our courses on the Solidarity Economy via CreativeStudy here.
✦ Find us on Instagram here.
March 2023 to March 2024
From Regranting to Redistribution: How the Cultural Solidarity Fund Moved Money and Why We Need Community-Centered Coalitions
Artists & the Solidarity Economy Movement
In 2023, I started a deeper collaboration with Emma Werowinski through a partnership with the Cultural Solidarity Fund (supported by Mellon Foundation) to study how coalitional structures can move money to support artists and cultural workers in and beyond times of crises.
✦ Read our report, From Regranting to Redistribution: How the Cultural Solidarity Fund Moved Money & Why We Need Community-Centered Coalitions, here.
November 2021 to May 2023
In the communities I flow with/through/beyond, I reflect on how people share knowledge, especially in soft and under-traced ways, to co-develop and expand communities.
I have and continue to organize gatherings and dialogues for collective inquiry, including potluck critiques, workshops on storytelling through craft, and pedagogical exercises for discussions of racial justice in the arts and culture sector, including in academia, at museums, and in cooperative organizing. These are the primary methods of my research: collection, dissemination, critique, and dissolution.
Outside of the projects below, I have also…
✦ written a piece for Fortunately Magazine, where I interview Esteban Kelly on the Solidarity Economy movement and transformative justice, which you can read here.
✦ contributed to The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping with entries on the Solidarity Economy and radical administration, which you can purchase here.
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Making
My craft practice is most intimately concerned with decay that occurs when different temporalities and spatialities of care exist or fade. What labors of love do we see and value? Where do they disintegrate? What renders one labor un/productive?
Eternal
Away from the Desk
Kitchen Craft & Textiles
I've been trying to balance my other work with kitchen crafts that inspire me: beyond cooking, and into weaving, lace-making, netting and other textile arts, in conjunction with the crafts involved in cooking/growing/farming/eating. Its fruits litter the gardens of my brain, but I have yet to document them formally, partially because they are meant to be felt and used.
This is made possible by the current work structure that my Co-Organizers and I follow at Art.coop and the gifts of the Textile Arts Center’s work-exchange program.
✦ See my weaving sketchbook here.
September 2018 to Today
Collaborative Apprenticeship
Labor, Knowledge & Resource Exchange
This is an on-going labor/resource exchange system that attempts to rebalance understandings of different forms of productivity (physical, mental, emotional).
From 2018 to 2019, the first iteration took place at the Rhode Island School of Design as a part of artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio.
✦ You can view the zine that documents my work with the Department of Furniture Design and the class of 2019 here.
✦ You can visit my collaborators' webpages below:
hannah bartlett, harry cassell, clayton cottingham, adam hunt fertig, rebecca ford, anya gupta, makoto kumasaka, marc librizzi, adrienne may, jacob miller, max pratt, monel reina, meimei wang, soo joo, valeria buttaci rincon, tom caycedo, dan cha, kira dekhayser, haojun ‘frank’ gong, sisi zhang, bea mandel, rowan mccalister, jon ng, elena ralls, rowan shaw-jones, lotte walworth, irene wei, yuning ‘ruby’ zhu
In the summer of 2019, the second iteration took place at the Center for Complexity, and was titled Slumber Party. Its primary documentation is not available without direct inquiry to all participants, whose emails are as follows:
✦ Jess Brown theladyjbrown@gmail.com
✦ Eury Kim eury.christina.kim@gmail.com
✦ Sophie Engel sengel@risd.edu
✦ Madeline Woods mwoods@risd.edu
✦ Charlotte Clement cclement@risd.edu
✦ Irina Wang iwang03@risd.edu
✦ Its secondary documentation, in the form of the reasoning provided for the Center for Complexity to 'allow' this event, is available here.
From 2019 to 2020, the third iteration, known as Filed Work, took place at Dia Art Foundation. Filed Work unpacked the relationships between arts institutions, anti-institutional artists, and their inherent coexistence.
In the summer of 2022, the fourth iteration took place at Moos in Am Treptower, Berlin, and intended to look at domestic labor and feminist economics in communal living spaces; this project was paused.
From 2022 onwards, the fifth iteration has manifested partially into how Art.coop organizes itself as a team of part-time, full-time, and contracted workers, and in how we organize our programming.
May 2021 to May 2022
PROCESS: 20 YEARS SINCE
Post-9/11 Trauma in South Asian American Communities
PROCESS: 20 YEARS SINCE is a mini-docuseries and interactive digital exhibition which amplifies young South Asian American siblings’ calls to process — the past twenty years, and the next twenty years — in just, transformative, and unifying ways as the diaspora's first adult generation familiar only with a post-9/11 America.
I worked with artists Shravya Kag, Noor Khan, and Lameesa Mallic, and organizer Sharmin Hossain to bring this show together. On 10 September 2021, we marked the launch of the show at Judson Memorial Church, leading Jummah and a collective flower drawing across the street under the Washington Square Arch.
✦ See pictures of our 10 September installation, taken by Iqra Shahbaz, here.
✦ Since SAALT’s closure, the digital exhibition is no longer available; you can still hear the stories of the ten young siblings we interviewed here.
May 2019
box & lid
Metal Craft & Portraiture
*Part of artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio*
box & lid is the final piece in the series artifacts 314-520, made with scrap wood and metal. It holds all other pieces in the series.
✦ See pictures of box & lid here.
May 2019
the Big Tarlatan
Intaglio Printmaking
*Part of artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio*
The Big Tarlatan is the last soft ground intaglio etching in the series artifacts 314-520 and was created during breaks when working as a part-time studio assistant for my peers as a part of Collaborative Apprenticeship.
✦ See pictures of The Big Tarlatan here.
January to February 2019
artifacts 103-201
Intaglio Printmaking
*Part of artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio*
artifacts 103-201 is a collection of miniature soft ground intaglio etchings that use tarlatan to materially map the movements of makers in the studio.
✦ See pictures of artifacts 103-201 here.
December 2018
mold friend and mold friend 2
Metal Craft & Portraiture
*Part of artifacts 314-520: Labor Politics in the Studio*
mold friend and mold friend 2 are two paired artifacts, in the form of chairs, capturing an unstable art school studio practice, exhibiting creative labor that deteriorates over time when undercared for.
✦ Meet the mold friends here.
May 2018
Fifi
Metal Craft & Portraiture
Fifi is a metal portrait of a figure first met through Bahman Mohasses. In Mohasses's painting, Fifi simultaneously expresses a performative ecstasy and horror, depicting Iranian elite complacency and affiliation with struggles only when politically capitalizable. Fifi translates this character into metal and represents a mother's lap as a similar place of grotesque joy and agony, to be challenged, understood, and reconfigured. Her physical form reflects the circumstances of this reckoning, mirroring and paying homage to the aesthetics and forms of neighboring artists, namely Shaina Tabak, Reilly Blum, and Daphne Dos. Fifi ended her life in decay in a backyard, after a life of many people sitting on her lap to drink, sleep, gossip, and daydream.
✦ See Fifi with her friends here.
March 2018
Bear Trap
Metal Craft & Educational Tools
Bear Trap is a pedagogical exercise and sculpture, developed specifically to augment Tyler Inman's curricular practice. Reach out to experience Bear Trap yourself.
December 2017
Bentwood Sled (Sehnsucht)
Metal Craft & Portraiture
Built by hand, Bentwood Sled / Sehnsucht is carefully tended to since conception, remaining with its owner until it is worn down; thus it is an ongoing project awaiting its 'completion'.
✦ View pictures of Bentwood Sled here.
November 2017 to May 2019
Fifi [howls with happiness]
Printmaking & Drawing Portraiture
Inspired by Bahman Mohasses's Fifi Howls with Happiness, this series presents a mixed-media exploration of his void of a figure. Fifi has since become an extension with which to simultaneously bring together my multiple selves (who may not always see one another...).
✦ See portraits of Fifi here.
