Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: rupyctut.com
Rupy C. Tut was born in 1985 in Chandigarh, India, and lives and works in Oakland, California. She is a descendant of Sikh Punjabi refugees and a first-generation immigrant to the United States. She received a BS in Evolutionary and Ecological Biology from UCLA in 2006, followed by an MPH in Global Health from Loma Linda University in 2009. In 2016 she undertook individual training with master painter Dr. Susana Marin at the Prince's Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London, where she studied calligraphy and traditional Indian painting — a turning point that redirected her practice entirely.
She is a 2024 recipient of the SFMOMA SECA Art Award and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. She is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. In 2025 she was selected by Arion Press to create paintings illustrating their limited-edition letterpress version of Alice in Wonderland.
Tut creates densely figurative paintings using handmade mineral and plant-based pigments applied in layers to hemp paper or linen using fine-tip brushes — a labor-intensive process grounded in 18th-century Indian painting technique. She grinds and mixes her own pigments, building a limited palette of yellows, oranges, and reds that are simultaneously bright and earthy. Her subjects are primarily female figures — ancestral presences, dream protectors, women in lush landscapes — rendered with the contour-line precision and decorative intensity of traditional Sikh and Pahari painting, but addressing contemporary themes: immigration, motherhood, belonging, displacement, and ecological crisis. The work emerges from an experience of existing between cultures and geographies, and proposes painting as a form of ancestral dialogue and active belonging.
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