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The Commonwealth Club of California and the Townsend Center present a series of dialogues on catastrophe and storytelling.

Sugata Ray (UC Berkeley History of Art) talks with visual artist Ranu Mukherjee about the relationship between nature and the sacred, with a focus on India during the rise of the Anthropocene era.

Ray’s recent book, Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, explores the art and theology that emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850), an epoch marked by global climatic catastrophes.

Sugata Ray is associate professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focus on climate change and the visual arts from the 1500s onward. Ray is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019); Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2019; coedited); and Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming; coedited).

Ranu Mukherjee is a visual artist who makes paintings, animations and large-scale installations. Her current work focuses on shifting senses of ecology, non-human agency, diaspora, migration and transnational feminist experience. Her most recent installation was presented at the ecologically focused 2019 Karachi Biennale; she has exhibited solo at the San Jose Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Asian Art Museum, and the de Young Museum. She is an associate professor in graduate fine art at the California College of the Arts. Mukherjee is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris.