Marriage Material | Cheryl Mukherji

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 6th, 2025 6pm
On view: March 6th — May, 9th, 2025 | Media Release

Book Signing & Gallery Talk

Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl
Wednesday, April 9th, 6:30pm

To purchase a copy click here.

 Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present Marriage Material by Cheryl Mukherji, a site-specific installation that considers desirability, femininity, and domesticity in traditional matrimonial photographs and contemporary courtship by visual artist and writer Cheryl Mukherji.

The series Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl (2021-present) centers on vintage portraits of Mukherji’s mother and grandmother, taken in various staged domestic settings to woo potential suitors for arranged marriages in India. Once married, these essential images, a visual currency, were entered into family albums, forming a quiet sub-archive of these women in their 20s, with their identities and aspirations to be increasingly subsumed by all the events that occur after betrothal. The albums containing these portraits and their legacies were brought with Mukherji from India upon her immigration to the United States, where she began to reimagine the tradition by staging self-portraits within her domestic space, often evoking Indian photo studios and expanding the boundaries of public and private.

Hand-painted backdrops of whimsical domestic scenes hang behind her in her Brooklyn apartment, providing the fantastical and literal grounds against which Mukherji sets herself and her portraits. Still lifes and portraits photographed in front of backdrops extend scenes, stirring questions around the nature of objecthood and representation, which are further reified when the photograph is aligned over or behind the same backdrop in the gallery space. 

Archival images of Mukherji's mother and grandmother are enlarged to the point of their subjects receding into impressionistic murals or framed at their diminutive original scale and placed along different axes in relation to one another, revealing the evidence of their former, near-hidden existence hidden between the pages of albums. They now exist as part of a new counter-archive that includes Mukherji as she performs in the complicated space of what parts or aspects of oneself are shown, when, why, and for whom. 

About the Artist:
Cheryl Mukherji (b. 1995, India) is a visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In her work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album, using photography, text, video, printmaking, and installation.

Cheryl was awarded the New Generation Prize (Honorable Mention) at the PH Museum Women Photographers Grant (2024) and was the winner of the 97th Annual at the Print Center, Philadelphia (2023). She was a finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2024) and the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022) at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian.

She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Penumbra Foundation (2024), Stoneleaf Retreat (2023), Center for Photography at Woodstock (2022), and Baxter Street at Camera Club of New York (2021).

Her work has been exhibited, both solo and in group shows, at museums, festivals, and galleries such as the Brooklyn Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Museum of the City of New York, Minnesota Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, Museum of the Moving Image, Capture Photography Festival, Format Photo Festival, The Print Center, Baxter St. at Camera Club of New York, among others. Cheryl’s works are included in collections at the Harvard Art Museums and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Cheryl holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College, New York (2020), where she was awarded the Director's Fellowship.
cherylmukherji.com

Marriage Material was organized by Cheryl Mukherji and Lisa di Donato.
Associate Director: Lisa di Donato.

Ackknowledgements
Penumbra’s Project Gallery is generously supported in part by the Joy of Giving Something.

About the Project Gallery
The 300 square-foot Project Gallery offers emerging and mid-career artists a place to present new work. The exhibitions are developed in conjunction with Penumbra's editorial or educational programming. 

Contact: Lisa di Donato | lisa@penumbrafoundation.org