Purvai Rai (b. 1994, New Delhi, India; lives and works between New York and New Delhi) is a multimedia artist whose practice maps the entanglements between land, lineage, labor, and ecological precarity. Working across sculpture, textiles, drawing, and bookmaking, Rai grounds her work in the agricultural and architectural histories of her ancestral village of Nawanpind in Punjab, a landscape shaped by monsoon cycles, colonial land interventions, forced crop shifts, and ongoing political protest. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2025 and her BFA from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Perrotin, New York; Nunu Fine Art, New York; THK Gallery, Cape Town; and Gallery Espace, New Delhi, and is included in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), India. She was a 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Henry Moore Foundation in the United Kingdom.

Two additional bodies of work deepen Rai’s commitment to collaborative making with the women of her village. The Memory Traces, 2024–2025, series layers cotton embroidery by Rohini Kaur, Rajni Bala, Rajwant Kaur, Geeta Singh, and Manpreet Kaur onto sheets of silk, which have been washed with glass beads
and resin. These surfaces are punctuated by acrylic whose arrangements echo crop spacing, irrigation patterns, and seasonal erosion. Each dot becomes a precise record of agricultural memory, foregrounding women’s often-overlooked
labor in sustaining both household and field, particularly during periods when male farmers travel to the capital to protest.