Local native returns home to display artwork

Sep. 24—Born in Auburn and raised in Yuba City and Marysville, artist Rajkamal Kahlon returns home to display her 20 years of artwork with "And I Still Rise," a collaboration with Yuba Sutter Arts and Culture and the University Library Gallery at Sacramento State.

"Art began as a survival strategy so I could make sense of the world I was in," said Kahlon. "It was full of inequality and violence and on a societal level everyone was not pretending that this country was formed on the oppression of colored people."

"And I Still Rise," Kahlon's first solo exhibition, contains artwork that was displayed in New York in 2005. It was an exhibition that was very shocking at the time and people were not able to deal with the imagery, said Kahlon. That artwork has now become the conversation in America, displaying an intersection of visuality, violence and colonial history.

"I had success to a certain point," said Kahlon. "For me, painting was something more radical but when the work got too outside of contemporary art, people weren't receptive to it. I hit a wall at a certain point in my career in the U.S. It wasn't possible to live off it financially and one's work had to be more decorative and not contain so much political content."

Kahlon moved to Berlin, Germany, in 2010 because of her economic challenges in the U.S. and her husband who lived there. As she continued her career in Europe and received better responses to it, her artwork for "And I Still Rise" was collecting dust in her father's garage.

After a few years of speaking with Kelly Lindner, Art Galleries and Collections Curator of the Sacramento State University Library Gallery, Lindner drove to her father's home and curated the art and was able to bring the artwork back into the conversation, said Kahlon.

"It's unusual for a curator to do all this extra work," said Kahlon. "It's extra special that she's produced it for this region."

The "And I Still Rise" exhibition will be held in the theater gallery at the Sutter Theater Center for the Arts, located at 745 Plumas St., Yuba City, from Saturday through Oct. 29. The reception for the gallery exhibition will be on Saturday from 4-7 p.m. With a grant fund from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two exhibits of Kahlon's will be displayed in Yuba City and at the Sacramento State University Library Gallery.

"This collection of art speaks to social issues like discrimination," said David Read, executive director of the Yuba Sutter Arts Council. "This art is something that challenges people to rethink how society treats minorities, especially immigrants. This is a huge deal because of the large population of Sikhs and minorities we have here."

Within the exhibition, Kahlon features three distinct collections including seven portraits commemorating victims from the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. This body of work, called "Enter My Burning House," was painted on the unbound pages of "The Passing of the Great Race" by Madison Grant, a doctrine which spread belief of racial purity and influenced many of the country's restrictive laws on immigration in 1920. Kahlon worked on this specific project during the spring of 2021. In order to create this artwork, she reflected on her own identity, specifically her background and the migration crisis and its relation to colonialism.

"They were immigrants of various points in the U.S.," said Kahlon. "Some were close to a path of citizenship. As you view the seven individual portraits, we think about who lived and who they were."

Kahlon was raised by immigrant parents in Yuba City at a time when Indian farm workers felt exploited by the farm owners. Her parents realized they were never going to be able to save enough money to make a living and a family friend helped Kahlon and her family move to the Bay Area. In the Bay Area, Kahlon witnessed how her parents were determined to make a better life for themselves and their children, regardless of their job as factory workers.

"It feels really important to be coming home and I haven't really had my work in conversation in the U.S. for the 12 years since I moved to Berlin," said Kahlon. "It is very meaningful for me, personally symbolic, to have my work displayed here in the Yuba-Sutter area because I have so many roots here. It was here where my parents began to teach me to work with dignity and to never give up."