In the heart of Hollywood, amid the city's expanding cultural landscape, a quiet revolution is unfolding-one that positions contemporary South Asian art not as a niche interest, but as a vital and evolving conversation in the global art world. At the centre of this movement is Rajiv Menon, whose new flagship gallery, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, opened its doors this month with an ambitious mission: to create a dedicated space for South Asian artists in the United States.
Raghav Babbar Raghav Babbar
Menon, who comes from a background in visual culture and media, has long been immersed in questions of representation. His journey into the art world was less a calculated pivot and more an organic return to an enduring passion. "Before I worked in entertainment and marketing, I did my PhD at NYU, and my focus was visual culture. I was writing about everything from film and television to contemporary art and fashion," he says. That academic foundation, combined with his early years in New York wandering Chelsea's galleries, planted the seeds for what would eventually become Rajiv Menon Contemporary.
Anoushka Mirchandani
The gallery's inaugural exhibition, EXHIBITIONISM, brings together 19 South Asian artists whose works explore themes of visibility, intimacy and identity. But beyond its role as an exhibition space, Menon sees the gallery as part of a broader cultural moment. "Indian Americans and wider South Asian Americans are culturally coming of age," he explains. "We've only really been able to immigrate in large numbers since 1965 and are now starting to enter positions of leadership-not just in medicine and law, but in politics, Silicon Valley, tech and Hollywood." This shift, he argues, has created a new kind of cultural confidence-one where South Asians are no longer proving their belonging but actively shaping mainstream narratives.
Bhasha Chakrabarti
Menon's vision extends beyond simply exhibiting South Asian artists. His goal is to foster a community that connects artists with collectors, cultural institutions and, crucially, each other. "I think what art has done is provide completely new approaches to representation," he shares. "Rather than wanting to recreate our culture with pure accuracy or familiarity, artists are constantly showing us things we've never seen before. That sense of possibility and imagination is so exciting among this community." While South Asian culture has long been celebrated in literature, fashion and film, contemporary visual art has often been left out of the conversation-something Menon is determined to change. "In LA, you can see art from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, but no one was really speaking to South Asia. And yet, the audience's palette was already fundamentally global."
Chitra Ganesh
That infrastructure is now actively being built, and Menon sees his gallery as one piece of a much larger movement. "Artists like Anoushka Mirchandani, whose work engages with the legacy of Partition and immigration, or Joya Mukerjee Logue, whose dreamlike compositions reference ancestral memory, are demonstrating just how expansive and globally relevant South Asian art is." The goal, he says, is not just to carve out a niche, but to ensure that South Asian contemporary art is fully integrated into global dialogues.
Founder-owner Rajiv Menon outside his gallery
Founder-owner Rajiv Menon at his gallery
The arrival of Rajiv Menon Contemporary marks a shift in how South Asian artists are being positioned within global art institutions. Already, the gallery has placed works in major U.S. museum collections, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. But this shift is not just institutional-it is reflective of a broader cultural appetite for South Asian perspectives. "South Asian artists are entering the culture in a bigger way," Menon says. "Audiences may initially encounter elements they're unfamiliar with, but they quickly find themselves connecting with broader human themes in the work."
Rajiv Menon Contemporary
That growing momentum is also visible in the way the South Asian diaspora is engaging with its own creative identity. There is a greater ease in moving between cultures-less assimilation anxiety, less pressure to prove one's Americanness or one's authentic Indianness. "It allows for great art to flourish because it's not trapped in all these anxieties around identity," Menon agrees.
Sahana Ramakrishnan
As the gallery moves forward, Menon hopes to continue fostering deeper artistic dialogue between artists from the diaspora and the subcontinent. "We're showing art both from the subcontinent and the diaspora, contextualising it in the West. On the subcontinent side, there's this perception that diaspora culture is inherently derivative, diluted, somehow backwards or stuck in time," he explains. "And then in the Western context, there's this impression that everything that comes from South Asia is somehow inferior. We're great at craft and heritage and tradition, but when it comes to the contemporary, when it comes to art and fashion and film, it's seen as somehow not as strong as what's being presented with a global audience in mind." By placing South Asian artists into major museum collections and building relationships with collectors outside of the community, Menon is actively shifting those narratives.
Shyama Golden
This moment in time is more than just the success of one gallery-it is an inflexion point in the history of the South Asian diaspora. The shift Menon describes is happening across industries, with South Asians entering mainstream creative fields not just as participants, but as tastemakers, curators and decision-makers. The gallery stands as a marker of this shift, positioning South Asian contemporary art at the forefront of a larger cultural realignm.