TalkAbout: Wild, Wild Country with Performance

Join us for a lively conversation in the gallery about the practice and appropriation of yoga culture with artist Preetika Rajgariah and special guests Melanie Holst-Collins, Aditi Ohri, and Nadia Waheed. Following the program, Rajgariah confronts cultural appropriation in the participatory performance, Waiting to Exhale. Performance will begin at 1 pm.

TalkAbout is a program that facilitates casual conversations with artists and the people who inspire them.

About the speakers

Preetika Rajgariah is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of cultural identity, perceptions of exoticism, and gendered materiality while specifically referencing her upbringing as an Indian born American. She has attended residencies at ACRE, the Vermont Studio Center, and the School of Visual Arts, and her work was included in New American Paintings #102. She has exhibited at a variety of spaces nationally such as Western Exhibitions, Roots & Culture, and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, Fort Gondo in St. Louis, as well as Art League and Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX. She received her BFA from Trinity University (2008) and MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2018). Currently, she lives and works in Houston, TX.

Melanie Holst-Collins is a Sacred Space Facilitator and educator, insightful writer, tea snob, creator of The Rooted + Growing Oracle Deck, Full Ass Human campaign and founder of Grow Your Lovespace. Her passion is to spread the perspective that embracing and rooting into our human experience is a valuable survival tool and direct path to spiritual growth and healing. As a coveted resource for facilitating transformative, healing, community spaces in the Central Texas area and beyond, Holst-Collins incorporates yoga, meditation, tea ceremony and engaging group conversation in her Sacred Spaces to offer tangible tools and experiences for personal and spiritual growth.

Aditi Ohri is an art historian, writer and artist. Her work addresses issues of belonging, tradition and cultural metamorphosis. She has been featured in group exhibitions at XPACE and Le Labo in Tkaronto (Toronto). She contributed a chapter to the anthology Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory and Resistance, edited by Charmaine Nelson, Captus Press 2018. She holds an MA from Concordia University Montreal and has a Yoga Teacher Certification from the Sacred Roots Yoga School in Austin.

Nadia Waheed makes large scale contemporary figurative paintings that are partially autobiographical and explore female selfhood, vulnerability, and cultural trauma. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She has upcoming exhibitions at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco, Arsenal Contemporary NY for The Armory Show ‘20 in New York, as well as a solo exhibition with Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami during Art Basel ‘20. She has lived and worked in Austin since mid 2018.