Rupy C. Tut
Rupy C. Tut Portrait Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco Photo: Em Monforte
By Emily Wilson
Rupy C. Tut moved from India to Los Angeles with her family when she was 12. She studied pre-med at the University of California, Los Angeles, but even with the demands of her studies, she kept painting. She moved to Oakland, and looked for public health jobs, but still painted, using a room in her house as a studio. When Tut made the decision to be a full-time artist, she devoted herself to excellence, traveling to England once a year for almost a decade to study traditional Indian painting. Tut's care is evident in everything she does, such as mixing her own pigments and sourcing her paper.
When I think of Tut, I think of the expression, "going from strength to strength." A painting of hers was chosen for the first de Young Open in 2020, where artists from the Bay Area applied to be in a salon-style show at the museum. When the Fine Arts Museums got $1 million in 2022 to buy pieces by contemporary Bay Area artists, she was one of 30 whose work was chosen. Her work has been shown at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, the Fowler Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Phoenix Art Museum, and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, among others. In 2024, she received both the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which led to a six-month exhibition at that institution. Both the Cantor Art Institute at Stanford University and SFMOMA itself acquired work from those shows.
Currently, Tut has work in three group exhibitions: The Outwin: American Portraiture Today at the National Portrait Gallery (through August 30); Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms at Crocker Art Museum (through May 3); and Diaspora Stories: Memory and Belonging at the Horton Art Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (through April 3). She is also working on paintings for the Arion Press's version of Alice in Wonderland, coming out at the end of 2026.
And, for the first time, her work is on display outside museum walls, with The Potluck Picnic, of layered paintings of trees, mountains and the ocean on the exterior of the San Francisco Community College's Downtown Center building at 4th and Mission (City College will no longer be in that building after this semester, but Tut's art won't be affected.)
ICA SF Rupy C Tut The Picnic Potluck Installation Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno
Tut, who says just seeing a tree when she is walking in a city energizes her, likes the idea of people on their way to work or school or doing errands, looking up and seeing paintings of greenery and slices of the natural landscape.
ICA SF Rupy C Tut The Picnic Potluck Installation Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno
"I literally walk in cities from one tree to the next," she said. "I was like, OK, maybe there's someone who's passing by who is going to be able to spot a tree, a mountain and water just seeing something like that, I think brings you a minute of pause and rest that you might not have access to because you have eight hour shift, or you've been in meetings all day or in front of a computer."
The title, The Potluck Picnic, came out of thinking of the importance of food in gathering people together. Tut, who has three young children, says a lot of her life revolves around getting together with other families and bringing food, which she thinks creates bonds.
"Sustenance for people is not something that can be taken lightly," she said. "We know people who make bread or make cookies for me and bring them over, and I'm like, 'This is such an important thing you're doing. You're creating sustenance and joy for someone else.'"
Ali Gass, the executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, says with the institution switching to a nomadic model, they knew they wanted to do public artworks, and commissioned this work in partnership with the Yerba Buena Partnership with funding from the Downtown Development Corporation. Along with Tut, Jeffrey Gibson, the artist whose show opened ICA SF at their Dogpatch location in 2022 and the U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale in 2024, also made public work in the neighborhood. His large-scale installation is on the façade of the former Bloomingdale's building downtown.
Tut had one of her first museum exhibitions, Out of Place, at the ICA SF in 2023, and Gass says when looking for a local artist to have work in conversation with Gibson (who lives in upstate New York), Tut was an obvious choice.
"Both Jeffrey and Rupy have practices that are visual and spectacular and pushing boundaries," Gass said. "But also, both of them are really about community and convening in such interesting ways. And I think public art should very much be about community and convening."
Access to art is important, Tut said, and she loved creating this piece. Her other projects mean a lot to her as well. She says she cried for three days after seeing her work at the National Gallery under a sign reading "American Portraiture Now."
Rupy C. Tut, Portrait of a Woman, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: Phillip Maisel. This is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.
Working with Arion Press, which typesets, prints and binds books by hand, to create her own illustrations for the famed Alice in Wonderland, Tut did her usual careful work, not looking at the original illustrations at all, but reading the text 10 times while taking notes, paying attention to the narrative, the characters, the shapes and colors, and the creatures.
She says she loved creating her own world in the book. A dessert fan, she enjoyed creating a tower of treats mentioned in the book. And Tut, who says a core memory of hers is playing cards with her grandmother every Sunday while eating oranges, drew on that to create Alice in Wonderland's deck of cards.
"It's been really beautiful to create stories around Alice that are my own as well," she said. "And it's obviously a brown Alice. I'm like, 'This is so crazy that I'm doing this. This is so fun.'"
