From spending her time traversing the Himalayas during her college days to living in New York for several years, art and curator Myna Mukherjee—she is also the founder of Engendered, a transnational arts and human rights organisation—has been an avid traveller all her life. It was travel that allowed the South Delhi resident to make a smooth transition from being a financial consultant to an arts practitioner. In this interview with The Morning Standard, Mukherjee speaks to us about being a globetrotter, her favourite destinations, and more.
Excerpts…
Her earliest travel memories...
My Instagram username is ‘Soul Nomad’, and I have lived a very nomadic life. My father was in the army, so we travelled a lot—we would not be in one place for more than two years. Then I went to Kansas, the US, for a high school exchange programme and that was one of my first major travels. I went to Fort Leavenworth—it had students from more than 70 countries. It was a formative part of my life. After my bachelor’s, I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and then went to Wall Street in New York. I lived in New York for 25 years and I loved being there. I travelled to many parts of the US—Harrisburg, Orlando, etc., places I never thought I’d see.
On finding inspiration through art
I have seen so many different kinds of art. New York is a super cosmopolitan place but one of the most amazing things about New York is that you have all of these neighbourhoods that are so specific to different cultures—you’ll have the Dominican neighbourhood, the Asian community, Chinatown; you go to Astoria, Queens, and you get to see the Greek. And then, you will have different kinds of art that comes from there.
You get to see so much, especially how specific and different the language of art is to artists who are from particular regions. You also get to see the universal versatility of some of the themes that come through the artists’ imaginations. So, it [travelling] makes our aesthetic very strong, because it gives us exposure to so many influences. You get a very broad perspective of the world, and you understand how ‘different’ is also ‘beautiful’. When you see the same aesthetic, what happens is that your taste becomes very limited.
Whereas for a lot of art, the more you see, the more you develop an aesthetic muscle for it. You develop an eye for being able to look at different works from different parts of the world, and to be able to identify the strength and beauty in it.