Sana Javeri Kadri '16 and Juliette Walker '13, Pomona College Art alumni and former grantees of the Rembrandt Club Junior Art Prize, presented at an online event hosted by the Rembrandt Club on Thursday, October 8th. The two artists shared their creative journey since graduating from Pomona.
After receiving the Rembrandt grant in 2015, Sana Javeri Kadri used it to fund her senior project on The Art of Food Justice, Sustainability, Community, Social Practice, and Other Big Words. She considers the project a “transformational journey” that inspired her to start considering the history of spices and their relation to colonialism. Interested in the recent popularization of turmeric, a traditionally Indian ingredient, Sana moved back to her birthplace, Mumbai, India, to explore the history and production of spices. Through research, she learned about the reductive and depreciatory nature of the popularized colonial labels of agricultural products, and that the traditional commodity model was putting local farmers at a disadvantage. Sana is now the founder and CEO of Diaspora Co., a company dedicated to decolonizing the spice trade by exporting single-origin spices directly from small Indian farmers.
Juliette Walker, a 2012 grantee, used her funds in her senior project to create social space through pie-making and letter writing. To her, art can be used to enhance human connections and cultivate interpersonal bonds. In her 2018 project The Homemade Exchange, Juliette created mugs from Maine costal clay and gave it out to the residents in exchange for local stories and personal experiences, which are later transcribed into a collection of poems. The project mirrors the one in 2013, in which she created a ceramic mug for every graduating senior at Pomona College. While Juliette continues her exploration of ceramics and sculpture in graduate school, a residency trip to Norway inspired her to transform her studio into an interactive residency space, allowing people to create art using reclaimed clay. Due to the pandemic, Juliette has been reframing the space of art making, centering her recent artistic practices around her house and home garden.