RISD Painting Department Kicks Off 2026–27 Kirloskar Visiting Scholars Programming

On a beautiful autumn day, grad students in RISD’s Painting department took to the streets of downtown Providence to sketch maps as part of a workshop led by visiting artist Pallavi Sen. The exercise was less about making accurate maps one could easily find online and more about capturing the emotional content of the surroundings, the interrelation of architecture and people, the patterns of the brickwork, and the general shapes of buildings and signs.

Sen is one of this year’s Kirloskar Visiting Scholars. Established in 2013 through a generous donation from Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar, the endowed program connects RISD with South Asia-focused artists, who give lectures, serve as guest teachers, and otherwise engage with the community. Originally from New Delhi, India, Sen teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts and makes a wide variety of works, including tiled murals, seasonal gardens, drawings, prints, and watercolor paintings. 

Sen, who will return to RISD in the spring to speak about her practice, is one of three artists contributing to the 2026–27 program. Bangladeshi-American artist Asif Hoque will work with students in early December and give a talk about his painting practice exploring landscape, memory, mythology, and imagination. 

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Native New Yorker Mala Iqbal MFA 98 PT/PR—recipient of fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among other honors—visited campus in late October to lead an informal discussion about her contributions to The Imaginary Quotidian. Organized collaboratively by the Painting department, the exhibition features work by all three of this year’s Kirloskar scholars and is on view through November 6 in RISD’s Memorial Hall Gallery.

“These artists position drawing as a central medium in their practice,” notes Graduate Program Director Meena Hasan. “For them, drawing is a space for simultaneous thinking and making through touch and experimentation. Marks are emphatically layered, veils of transparency expose past and preparatory marks, and the edges of figures and spaces are redefined and obliterated as the artists wrestle with materiality and surface.”

Students packed into the gallery to see the work and hear Iqbal’s story. The daughter of a German mother and a Pakistani father—both scientists, who met in the US—she was raised in a household where three cultures and four languages converged. “My mother read Grimms’ Fairy Tales aloud to me, and that’s how I learned to speak German,” the artist noted.

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Subtle evidence of the Grimms’ influence can be seen in Iqbal’s work, including in the never-before-displayed Caged (2020, gouache on paper), a large gothic tableau showing masked villains taking away a caged caravan-load of people in chains. In another disturbing piece, Dog and Weimar Duck Skeleton (2022, gouache and crayon on paper), a skeleton wearing a boa flirts with a toothy dog. “I’m drawn to open-ended narratives,” Iqbal said, “images that make the viewer say, What is going on here?”

Iqbal said she rarely has a plan before she starts a piece and sometimes “smushes” a blob of paint on the paper, finds a shape, and goes from there. “I use a lot of acrylic gouache on paper,” she told students. “You can thin it down all the way to translucent but also use it opaque. It doesn’t bleed the way traditional gouache does.”

“Drawing has always been the thing that helps me get unstuck and the place where I feel most comfortable,” she added. “It’s cheap, it’s small, it’s portable, and you can do it in bed!”

Simone Solondz / photos by Kaylee Pugliese
October 27, 2026