Rajiv Menon contemporary arrives at India Art Fair, bringing a diasporic palette home

When Rajiv Menon Contemporary opens its booth at India Art Fair this February, the moment will read as both an arrival and a return. The Los Angeles–based gallery has spent the past year inserting South Asian and diasporic practices into the circuits of American museums, fairs and private collections. Now, it steps into Delhi with a presentation that asks what it means for colour, narrative and cultural memory to travel and to change along the way.

Barely a year old, the Los Angeles gallery makes its India Art Fair debut

Founded in 2024, Rajiv Menon Contemporary has moved at a pace that feels unusual even by the accelerated standards of the contemporary art market. In under twelve months, the gallery has logged more than a dozen museum acquisitions, secured recognition from LACMA, sold out a booth during Miami Art Week and landed on Artsy’s list of galleries to watch. That visibility has been earned through a tightly articulated programme rather than spectacle, grounded in the practices of artists who work across South Asia, North America and the Pacific.

Rajiv’s decision to establish a permanent space in Los Angeles shaped that trajectory early on. “The first major decision was committing to a permanent space in Los Angeles and accepting the need for a physical hub—one that could serve South Asian art while also functioning as a site of cultural exchange between the subcontinent and North America,” he says . The gallery emerged from a sense of absence rather than opportunism. As a collector, Rajiv saw artists across the diaspora and the subcontinent whose work rarely entered West Coast institutions or commercial galleries. Building something that addressed that gap became the organising principle for everything that followed.

Institutional validation arrived quickly. Works by gallery artists entered the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, LACMA and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco during the first year. For Rajiv, those placements carry weight beyond market signals. “Museums are the ultimate tastemakers—they signal longevity, cultural significance, and a place within the canon,” he notes. “For artists, these acquisitions often mark a meaningful turning point, a real leveling up” . The emphasis on longevity is telling. The gallery’s ambitions sit less with fast turnover than with building a durable context for practices that have often been marginal to American art histories.

That context has been carefully constructed through curatorial decisions. During Miami Art Week, the gallery presented at Untitled with a two-person dialogue between Ammama Malik and Sid Pattni, foregrounding narrative, history and the strategic use of absence. The booth sold out, but the commercial result was secondary to the clarity of the proposition. Miami, Rajiv argues, offered a stage on which South Asian art could be read as part of a global conversation rather than a niche category.

India Art Fair extends that conversation into a different register. The booth brings together works by Melissa Joseph, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Rajni Perera, Shyama Golden, Maya Seas, Devi Seetharam and Nibha Akireddy, alongside the India debut of Gisela McDaniel. The throughline is colour, approached as both inheritance and a site of friction. Rajiv describes the project as an examination of “the diasporic palette,” a phrase that resists easy decoding.

“South Asia is often flattened in Western contexts through a narrow visual shorthand—marigolds, mangoes, saturated reds and oranges,” he explains. “While these references come from real cultural histories, they can also be limiting” . Across the booth, artists engage with that shorthand in divergent ways, sometimes leaning into saturation, sometimes withholding it, sometimes reframing it through figuration, abstraction or mythic narrative. The result is a visual field that refuses a single reading of what South Asian colour should look like.

The question of resistance sits beneath those aesthetic decisions. Colour becomes a way of pushing against expectations placed on diasporic artists, particularly within Western markets that have long relied on recognisable cues. Rajiv is clear that this tension is productive when it is not overdetermined by an external gaze. “If you decenter the assumption that Euro-American perspectives are the default, many of these concerns dissolve,” he says. “By creating a space where South Asia is assumed as the norm, those concerns begin to dissipate because the Western gaze is no longer central” .

That repositioning carries different stakes in India. Rajiv Menon Contemporary has shown in the country before, but this marks its first presentation at India Art Fair. Diasporic voices can still be read with scepticism within subcontinental contexts, framed as adjacent rather than embedded. Rajiv acknowledges that anxiety, particularly as an Indian American returning to India, yet he remains committed to the proposition that diaspora and subcontinent are deeply entangled. Globalisation since the 1990s has shaped both, producing overlapping experiences rather than discrete ones.

Introducing Gisela McDaniel to Indian audiences exemplifies that approach. McDaniel, whose practice centres on representations of women of colour and Pacific Islander histories, enters the booth in dialogue with South Asian women artists. Her paintings of figures such as Hiba Schahbaz and Maya Seas open onto what Rajiv describes as “larger cultural solidarities that include the subcontinent” . The gesture reframes diaspora as a network rather than a hierarchy, connecting Pacific and South Asian narratives without collapsing their specificity.

Los Angeles remains a key influence on how those narratives are framed. Rajiv speaks often about the city’s relationship to storytelling, shaped by film, television and a visual culture steeped in myth-making. That sensibility runs through the gallery’s roster, which he characterises as fundamentally narrative-driven. At a recent presentation at the Jaipur Centre for Art, the artists were framed as the “Nonresident School,” a term that emphasised collective force over individual branding. The aim was to position them as participants in a shared cultural movement rather than isolated successes.

That collective ethos extends beyond exhibitions. On the opening night of India Art Fair, the gallery will host an invitation-only salon at a Delhi collector’s home, convened with Teesta Bhandare. The format favours conversation over spectacle, reflecting Rajiv’s interest in how younger collectors in India are approaching art in the wake of liberalisation and global circulation. These collectors, like the artists themselves, are navigating inherited structures while shaping new ones.

For all the momentum of its first year, Rajiv Menon Contemporary resists narratives of early arrival. Rajiv frames the recent recognitions as carrying responsibility rather than closure. The long-term project, as he describes it, is to build cultural structures that shift how South Asia is viewed in the West and how diasporic practices are understood at home. That is work measured in decades rather than seasons.

At India Art Fair, the gallery’s booth operates as a hinge between those ambitions. It brings practices forged across continents into a setting where questions of belonging, authenticity and authorship remain live. The palette on view is neither fixed nor ornamental. It moves, absorbs and pushes back, carrying with it the traces of where it has been and the possibilities of where it might land next.

Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Booth AO2   India Art Fair, Delhi February 6 through 9, 2026.  

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