Sharmistha Ray, May - June 2026

Sharmistha Ray in front of their painting. Credit: Zachary Riggleman

Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist, art critic, curator, and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Their artistic practice uses modes of abstraction to explore imagery related to Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, the patterning and ornamentation of South Asian crafts and sacred architecture in relationship to global modernisms and queer futurity.

Working primarily in painting and drawing, they have also made work in sculpture and installation, curated projects, and written prolifically on art. In addition to their solo work, they co-founded the spiritualist feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost which acts as a collaborative model for research, artistic production, pedagogy, and community.

Ray’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions and projects internationally at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galería RGR, Mexico City; Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens, NY; The Parallax Center, Portland, OR; The Armory Show, New York, NY; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY; and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, India, among many others.

Ray is the recipient of the Montblanc Young Artist Worldwide Patronage Award, TED Fellowship, and Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, and has been an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; and Art Cake, Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews of their work have appeared in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Art India, Take on Art, and TimeOut Mumbai. Ray received a dual degree MFA in Painting and MS in Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute and BA from Williams College. 

Visit Sharmistha’s website here.