Artist Profiles

In addition to being a textile artist, Meeta Mastani is a writer, lecturer, social activist, and even a professor: in 2016, she was an artist-in-residence at The University of Wisconsin, where she instructed students on print-making and design. For over twenty-five years, Meeta has worked in sustainability and community development. From this commitment to local communities sprang the company Bindaas Unlimited, which Meeta co-founded as a fair-trade textile and craft business, where the goal is to create rural artisan employment and to preserve textile traditions.

This multi-faceted set of interests and skills has allowed Meeta to work alongside artisans both in her native India and abroad; she especially enjoys collaborating in the realm of printmaking, which has allowed her to start online and offline retail markets, as well as offer her services as a consultant of merchandising and branding.

Meeta is a master printmaker, a skill that she most often applies to fabrics, embellishing T-shirts and scarves, for example, with uniquely contemporary design motifs, juxtaposed with simple diamond shapes or wavy lines. The impulse of merging traditional symbols with contemporary motifs is apparent across many items designed by Meeta. This means a blouse might be playfully adorned with flip flops and umbrellas, but also that one of Meeta’s shirts could have patterning that mimics traditional Indian bell tota: delicate, colorful strands of small bells and beads, interspersed with cloth bird forms. The work she brings to IFAM is the result of a block printing collaboration with Studio Chaubundi in Rajasthan.