Rakhee Jain Desai, Coming Together, Handmade inks from Marigold, Sappanwood, Lac, Pomegranate, Cutch & Madder, 2025
Build Me A Garden: From Soil to Surface Labor, Lineage, and Living Materials
Rakhee Jain Desai
March 7 – April 18, 2026
Artist Reception: Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 7-9 p.m.
Artist Talk: Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 7-9 p.m.
Build Me A Garden: From Soil to Surface explores how relationships with land are developed and reimagined through labor, lineage and living materials. The exhibition uses craft techniques, abstraction, materiality, and sculptural gestures to give form to the intangible: memory, longing, belonging, and the emotional relationship between land and culture.
Drawing from her lineage in Rajasthan, India, Rakhee Jain Desai brings heritage textile knowledge, natural dyeing, mordants, resist techniques, and ecological processes into conversation with a land that did not birth these traditions but now holds its people. Through the acts of growing dyes in Texas soil, harvesting plant matter, and working with natural materials, Rakhee explores what it means to carry cultural knowledge across geographies and to plant it in new ground, building a garden of evolving culture and craft practices where color emerges from the chemistry of natural materials, soil, water, and time.
Website: www.rakheejaindesai.com
Instagram: @rjdartist
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