Meet the Artist
About
Reva Kashikar is a First-Generation American artist and educator working in Milwaukee, WI. She completed her MFA in Ceramics in 2020 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In July of 2021, Reva had the opportunity to move to Milwaukee to work as the Studio Manager for Lolly Lolly Ceramics and is currently the Production Lead and Internship Coordinator. At the start of 2022, Reva began teaching Ceramics at Columbia College Chicago as an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design Department.
While Reva’s primary material is clay, she pulls from a background in classical ballet and the performing arts to explore performance art, writing, and sculpture to express stories and experiences. During her time at SAIC, Reva worked at the Sullivan Galleries (now SAIC Galleries) as a Curatorial Assistant primary focusing on performance art festivals and programming events.
As Reva continues to explore a post-grad art practice and a continuing new normal in the pandemic life, she finds herself still asking the question: What does it mean to be an American? What does it look like? Who does it look like? Why are those the standards, and how can those standards change?
In the past year, her work has begun to pull more heavily from her heritage as an Indian. She is inspired by her parents journey of immigration, assimilation, and homemaking. From the perspective of an American, she is left with one main question: What does it mean to be part of the South Asian Diaspora?
Artist Statement
They say that the best story is always the one that comes from the soul — inspired by emotion and experience. But what is the soul?
At the core, this question is what my practice explores. Creating work that tries to understand what it means to be alive.
Love. Connection. Family. Heritage. Home.
My current work considers this question through the lens of personal history. History though, proves time and time again, that the answer is complicated and near impossible to answer. We fight for purity of the soul and in the process create boundaries that bar our access to truly understanding. Rather, dispersing and displacing communities and solidifying the things that make us different from one another.
As a first generation Indian American, I spend much of my research on understanding my own history. Through conversations with family members and learning traditions that are otherwise lost to me, I am finding more commonality between my own story and the stories of those that seem different from me at first. I’m finding that displacement binds us together in the search for meaningful and soulful connection.
Through the use of clay, I am able to explore these ideas in a medium that also crosses all boundary lines both physical and metaphorical. A memory prone material, clay holds onto every fingerprint, texture, and color from its environment. Clay too, has a complicated history, but it transforms and changes no matter the environment and I find myself inspired by my material to try to do the same.