Walk through a passageway woven from vintage saris and you're inside someone else's migration story, their displacement rendered as structure you can physically enter. This is the scale Suchitra Mattai works at, and it sets the tone for a Fowler Museum exhibition asking an uncomfortable question: for centuries, monuments have told us who matters. What happens when the material changes?
Installation view, “Textiles as Monument,” 2026, Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.
Opening August 9 at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Textiles as Monument brings together three artists of South Asian descent, Mattai, Jagdeep Raina, and Swapnaa Tamhane, who each treat cloth as an alternative to bronze and stone. Their subject is the same one textile history has always quietly carried forward: the labour, migration, and domestic life that official memorials tend to skip. Curator Syona Puliady describes the resulting works as counter-monuments, pieces that honour presence rather than conquest, built for and with the communities they represent rather than about them from a distance.
Mattai draws on her Indo-Guyanese and Caribbean heritage, and her newly commissioned installation traces the movement and displacement shaped by colonialism and indentured labour. Visitors don't view this piece so much as move through it, which feels deliberate. Where traditional monuments hold their ground and demand you look up, Mattai's woven architecture asks you to walk forward.
Raina works differently, using embroidery, quilt-making, and garment construction to document labour that rarely gets documented at all. His new commissions came out of conversations with Los Angeles communities, focusing on migrant and domestic workers whose efforts sustain the city while remaining largely unseen within it. The stitching functions as testimony, patient and specific, giving form to lives that public memory has historically left out of its record.
Bungha, Installation view and Detail, Swapnaa Tamhane. Photos: Fowler Museum
Tamhane's contribution grew from years of collaboration with textile-makers in Kutch. Her new works span several techniques: a sculpture in kala cotton paper pulp recalling the interior of an adobe home, patterned with mirror work lifted from the embroidery on a jacket already in the Fowler's collection; a weaving made in Bhujodi that reinterprets one of her own watercolours; an embroidered layer worked over a printed drawing. She describes the installation as informed by the workshop and studio of block printers, which places the maker's process at the centre of the piece rather than at its edges. Each technique carries its own history of craft passed hand to hand, making the work as much about method as about memory.
Curator Syona Puliady calls this a different kind of permanence, cloth that gets worn, mended, and handed down instead of fixed in place. She says, “Rather than monumentalising political power or conquest, Textiles as Monument asks what it means to honour communities whose contributions have often gone unseen, foregrounding stories often absent from public memory." For anyone who already understands textiles as carriers of memory, that's not a new idea, but rarely has it been given this much room, or this much institutional weight, to make its case.
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Further Information:
Textiles as Monument runs at the Fowler Museum at UCLA from August 9, 2026, with free admission.
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Lead: Suchitra Mattai, An Offering, 2023, Woven vintage saris, vintage fabric, trim, and fabric, H: 86 in; W: 209 in; D: 24 in. Collection of the artist.
All further images as credited in captions.