Natvar Bhavsar’s Guggenheim Fellowship (1970) placed Indian-origin abstract art inside the New York Color Field movement. Vishakha Desai’s appointment as Director of the Asia Society Museum (1990) shifted a major institution’s focus toward South Asian and Indian American artists, a curatorial shift extended through the Met Breuer’s inaugural Nasreen Mohamedi show (2016) and Tara Sabharwal’s appointment as Executive Director of the Rubin Museum of Art (2022). Bharti Kher’s 18-foot bronze Ancestor, installed at Central Park’s southeast entrance in 2022, challenged the conventions of American public monuments by centering a universal maternal form.
