Purvai Rai (b. 1994) is a mixed media artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, and New Delhi.
Rai’s work centres on the interplay between memory, identity, and materiality and utilises ritualistic, repetitive practices such as weaving, mark-making, and printmaking.
Thematically, she traces the evolution of Punjab across generations, examining the influence of changing regimes and sociopolitical structures. With this research, she reassesses ideas of tangible and intangible inheritance, the influence of place on memory transmission, and how these factors coalesce to manifest identity.
Materiality is at the heart of her practice, and she often works with natural materials like jute, cotton, and yarn. She is particularly interested in the tactility of natural fabrics, and how in the recesses of its weaves reside familial and generational memory, waiting to be inherited much as clothes are passed on from parent to child.
Rai’s delicate graphite and ink drawings on rice paper are conceived in response to social and political events, specifically those caused by religious and cultural discord. Distilled into an abstract visual language consisting of circles and elliptical patterns, Rai alludes and (re-)presents the precariousness of existing on the margins.
Rai is a 2025 MFA candidate in Painting and Printmaking at Yale School of Art, and completed her Bachelor’s degree through Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore in 2017. She was the artist in residence at the Henry Moore Foundation in 2024 and has participated in several exhibitions. She is represented by Gallery Espace in Delhi, India.
“The materials, visual elements, and gestures employed in the works function as multivalent signifiers that embody personal and collective narratives that accumulate over time. Making art assists me in finding interconnections between community, craft, agroecology (economy), architecture, and ancestrality prompting a reassessment of the influence of place on memory transmission and the formation of generational patterns.” Purvai Rai