As art market contraction became undeniable, few young galleries had the nerve to open and even fewer managed to find early success. One notable exception is Rajiv Menon Contemporary, a new L.A.-based gallery dedicated to bringing contemporary South Asian and diasporic art to the United States. Since opening in 2023, Menon has quickly carved out a place within the L.A. art ecosystem and beyond, presenting work by some of the most compelling South Asian artists of the last generation, including Surendran Nair, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Anoushka Mirchandani, Vikrant Bhise, Tarini Sethi and Viraj Khanna, while also serving as a conduit for introducing young South Asian and Indian artists to U.S. audiences and vice versa.
With ambitious programming, a clear curatorial vision and dealer Rajiv Menon’s relentless drive, the gallery has already attracted institutional attention, securing at least six museum acquisitions in its first year, including placements at the Portland Museum of Art, Bunker Art Space, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. Several more placements are in the advanced stages of negotiation.
Menon is now making his professional debut in his homeland, India, with “Non-Residency,” a group exhibition opening August 9 at the Jaipur Center for Art (JCA)—a striking venue rooted in tradition yet oriented toward the contemporary, set against the regal backdrop of The City Palace. Observer caught up with the dealer just days before the opening of the show, which marks the first time a gallery has independently taken over the entire palace grounds for a single, self-curated exhibition. Featuring works by sixteen artists across painting, sculpture and textiles, the exhibition also represents the first expansive, curated platform dedicated to a generation of contemporary Indian diasporic artists working abroad—artists whose practices engage aesthetics deeply tied to identity and tradition while navigating the cultural crosscurrents of migration and globalization. Reflecting the diaspora’s role as a bridge between India and the West at a moment when Indian art is rapidly rising on the global stage, the show becomes a powerful collective act of homecoming.
“I felt that there was so much good art coming out of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, but there were dedicated spaces where these works were being contextualized in conversation with each other, particularly on the West Coast,” Menon tells Observer. “There was a movement forming; I could feel it. It felt necessary to create a space that recognized this momentum and facilitated understanding it as something larger than any individual practice.”
Before opening his gallery, Menon—the first-generation son of Indian immigrants—was already an avid collector of South Asian art, closely tracking the rise of South Asian talent in the U.S. After earning his PhD from New York University, where he studied global media and visual culture with a focus on South Asian art, he recognized that a kind of collective school was beginning to emerge in North America. “The goal was to try to capture something bigger—something I sensed was in the air. It felt urgent,” he continues. “I was very aware that many of the themes South Asian artists are working with—migration, political precarity, urban alienation—are deeply relevant in South Asia and globally resonant.”
For Menon, who was born in Texas and traveled often to India, it was always clear that these weren’t marginal narratives—they belonged at the center of global cultural conversation, and at the same time, they were defining key perspectives within India’s rapidly shifting cultural identity.
From the outset, Menon also knew he needed to focus on young artists. “It’s still incredibly rare for a young Indian artist to exhibit in the U.S.; most have to wait until they’re mid-career, and that struck me as a real problem that needed to be addressed,” he reflects. Since India opened its economy in the early ’90s, the country and its society changed almost overnight, he explains. A generation has since come of age in a radically different cultural landscape deeply linked to and embedded within global society.
Complications around export in India, as in other countries in the region, make showing these artists in the U.S. particularly challenging. “You have to be deeply committed to building a program that has to navigate those logistics—making sure artists are able to get their work here, that it arrives safely, but also that it’s shown in the right context,” Menon explains. For him, that context is everything, and addressing it requires not only deep engagement but also a strong grounding in art history and visual culture in the region. It’s something Menon brings to the table, both as someone of Indian heritage and as a scholar, where he focused on global and South Asian visual culture. “I genuinely believe that kind of academic grounding is essential to doing this work justice and properly valorizing it.”
At the same time, while India has a solid and long-established gallery system, few galleries look beyond the local scene, rarely presenting Indian artists who live abroad or engaging deeply in international fairs. Some have become more visible at art fairs in the past two to three years, but because the domestic market remains strong and self-sufficient, there hasn’t been the same pressure to expand globally. That also means there is still considerable untapped potential.
Menon was ready to take on that challenge. “I saw an opportunity to help bridge that energy into the U.S. There just weren’t enough efforts being made to create those connections,” he says. So he stepped up, positioning himself as a link between the two markets.
In only a few months, Menon’s program became a destination for celebrating South Asian art and culture. Among the gallery’s notable supporters and regular visitors are actor Mindy Kaling, poet and activist Rupi Kaur, author and podcaster Jay Shetty and actor Poorna Jagannathan. This early success and the enthusiastic response, particularly from Los Angeles’s South Asian diaspora, led to the opening of a permanent space in Hollywood, which launched during Frieze Los Angeles 2025.
From the outset, Menon placed community activation and engagement at the heart of his vision. “The gallery’s goal wasn’t just to bring South Asian art into the L.A. landscape but also to bring South Asian people into the contemporary art landscape.” Many people he spoke with had never felt welcome in an art space. “Some didn’t even feel they had permission to fully engage, even when the work on view is by South Asian artists, it can still feel alienating,” he explains. Menon was determined to create a gallery rooted in a natural sense of hospitality where people feel genuinely welcome and comfortable asking questions. “I try to be very present, offering walkthroughs even to those who may not be looking to collect right now because for me, culture is the beacon,” emphasizes Menon.
His aim is for the art he shows to contribute to a broader cultural conversation. “I want visitors to leave with a deeper appreciation, knowing they might return, knowing this is a space for them,” he adds. “I love the idea that someone who’s never felt at home in a gallery might make their first acquisition here, then go on to build a collection across L.A., across the U.S. and beyond.” Menon hopes to foster a culture of connoisseurship within the diaspora while also creating space for a wider audience to engage meaningfully with South Asian art.
Yet as someone deeply embedded in his community, Menon knew that when people feel invited into spaces, they show up to participate and support. For him, the recent mayoral election in New York offered a telling example: South Asian voters played a major role in the Democratic primary. “They hadn’t been meaningfully engaged before, but once they were, they substantially moved the needle.” Now, Menon sees the same dynamic taking shape in the art world.
His community-centered approach and consistent focus on South Asian art have already delivered early results. Most of the museum acquisitions he secured this year came through South Asian diaspora collectors, many of whom were younger and had never donated to a museum or taken part in institutional philanthropy before but suddenly felt engaged and compelled to contribute to the broader representation of their communities within U.S. cultural institutions. “The moment people realize that making a museum donation can help anchor our cultural presence, there’s a real desire to be part of that,” he reflects. “South Asians in America want to participate in shaping the culture—they want to be part of that project of representation and influence.”
Securing institutional recognition was critical for Menon, and the curatorial response confirmed the strength of his focused, intentional program. “Getting these works into accessible public collections demonstrates that there was a gap that had not been addressed yet,” Menon reflects. “I’m also deeply proud that many of these acquisitions have been made possible through donations from the South Asian community.”
For Menon, this feels like the beginning of something with the potential to become a true cultural force. “The South Asian community is a major presence in the U.S. but remains underrepresented in institutional spaces. That’s what we’re working to change,” he says. His hope is that the momentum continues to build.
As a young gallerist, Menon is also deeply committed to engaging and educating the next generation of collectors. “As we’re working with emerging artists, we also want to be mindful of young collectors,” he says, noting the rise of a new generation of Indian collectors—ones who don’t want to collect the way their parents did. “They’re rethinking what art collecting looks like generationally. Given the major cultural rupture India experienced in the ’90s, their sensibilities are different,” he explains. “The kinds of cultural commentary they’re drawn to are different. And that’s created a really exciting opportunity to build something new.”
Since the gallery’s opening, Menon has seen remarkable enthusiasm from young collectors. “They’re excited to see India represented on a global stage in a fresh, forward-looking way.” Watching young people begin to engage with museums philanthropically and recognize this as a long-term journey they can build on is deeply meaningful, both for the country’s cultural production and its diaspora. “It’s the beginning of something much larger.”
This line of reflection also informed the concept behind the exhibition that just opened at the Jaipur Center for Art (JCA), in a city known mostly for its cultural heritage. The goal was to intervene in a particular dynamic: the gap between the diaspora and the motherland. “There’s a strong perception, especially among the creative classes in India, that the diaspora is behind—that we’re out of touch with modernity, clinging to a version of India rooted in the past. And there’s truth to that,” he explains. Still, Menon believes that emotional disconnect is fertile ground for creative expression. “I wanted to challenge the idea that the cultural output of the diaspora is somehow tacky or outdated, when it is in fact generating some of the most significant works and practices that speak across South Asia and the West with complexity and depth.”
According to Menon, one of the defining aspects of the art world in South Asia, particularly in India, is that it operates as a project of visual national identity. This extends across cultural production in India, he notes—not just in art, but also in film and especially in literature. “India is still a relatively young nation, and cultural output has always been a powerful tool in the project of nation-making,” he notes. For this reason, he argues, it is now just as important to explore—through both this show and his broader program—what that project means for people of Indian descent who don’t live within the country’s geographic boundaries but still feel deeply connected to its cultural identity.
With formal training first in literature, Menon often draws on precedents from that field, pointing to writers like Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, who were instrumental in the global rise of Indian cultural presence. “They’ve worked from within the diaspora, and it’s that in-between, interlocutory position that allowed them to speak across both worlds with a kind of clarity and complexity that wouldn’t have been possible from just one side.”
Still, India is incredibly heterogeneous with countless languages, regional cultures and perspectives, so defining a singular “India” is next to impossible, he acknowledges. Yet Menon believes it is precisely by navigating that heterogeneity that a broader and more resonant body of cultural work is emerging.
Indian galleries are also doing a remarkable job of carving out strong, thoughtful positions within that landscape and engaging larger questions about national identity and how it is shaped, contested and communicated through art. From the late ’90s through the 2000s, Menon notes, the dominant narrative was about India being globalized, with Western brands and sensibilities entering the country through consumer markets. But that story has shifted: today, India is increasingly seen as an agent of globalization, with its culture shaping global aesthetics well beyond its borders.
“There’s a clear effort to articulate what India looks like on the global stage through art,” he says. But Menon also raises a question often left unasked: what role does the diaspora play in that project? Can it help shape identity from outside the nation’s borders? And if so, how can it responsibly and meaningfully engage while acknowledging both its distance and its connection?
That’s what makes the stakes of art in India so high. It is a post-colonial country now transitioning into a major player on the global stage, and art is helping build and debate that identity—anchored in tradition yet linked to the world—in real time.
Menon is convinced that this new generation of Indian artists and collectors, particularly those engaging with galleries outside India, will help define that identity. At the gallery, he is currently showing the intricate textile-based works of Viraj Khanna, who uses traditional embroidery as a narrative device in one example of how deeply rooted methods of making can carry massive global influence. “That’s the cultural dynamic I’m trying to capture. I don’t want to frame Indian artists as simply striving to earn space in the West; I want to position them as active agents in reshaping it,” Menon says. “There’s an excitement around seeing Indian contemporary art on the global stage, and I think younger collectors are especially eager to be part of that conversation.”
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