Kanchan Wali-Richardson

Kanchan Wali-Richardson (born 1990) is an American interdisciplinary visual artist who currently lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother, Monona Wali, is an award-winning storywriter, screenwriter, and filmmaker.

Kanchan earned a full scholarship to attend The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, graduating with a BFA in 2012.[1][2] After graduation she worked both as a professional artist and as a designer and fabricator of custom furniture.[2]

Wali-Richardson received the Fulbright Nehru grant for the field of sculpture for the 2014/2015 year and lived in Varanasi, India. During her time in Varanasi, she researched pollution near the Ganges River and created the How to Feed the Hungry Ghosts series during this time. Her maternal family is from the city, yet she was born and raised in America and subsequently felt a cultural divide between the duality of her identity. She reflects that the Hungry Ghosts series is "a quiet meditation on the texture of these ancestral links: the texture of the city, and a rough quality of surfaces".[3] In 2015, she embarked on a project entitled River Sari, which she claims is a response to her time in Varanasi and a homage to the Ganges. The project consists of four handmade silk saris, with the pattern on each sari representing a different personal interaction with the mythology of the Ganges.[4]

The themes of her work primarily center around her personal relationship to the politics, religious implications, and sociality of environmental issues. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York.