A little treat across the Atlantic during NYC Art Week – Salt, Dust & Gold brings together the mixed-media works of Anshu Malhotra and Meenal Raghava to explore identity, memory, and place as fluid and continually evolving. Moving between abstraction, material experimentation, and emotionally charged surfaces, the artists approach a sense of self and lived experience as something shaped over time through ongoing change. The exhibition’s title draws on the physical and metaphorical qualities of its materials to evoke what remains, what grounds us, and what we choose to preserve. Together, Anshu and Meenal create a dialogue between structure and fluidity, memory and presence, accumulation and release. Their works evoke elemental forces —rivers, horizons, sediment, celestial expanses and shifting fields of color—suggesting how identity and memory gather, erode and change over time. The natural world becomes a shared point of connection, employing material as a record of experience.
Salt, Dust & Gold considers the “in-between” not as a condition of incompleteness but as a generative space of transition, negotiation and possibility among an evershifting sense of self and place. The opening reception happens today, Thursday, November 12, from 6–8pm in conjunction with NYC Art Week. Accompanying programming includes an Artist Talk on Saturday, November 21 from 2–4pm.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Anshu Malhotra is an abstract mixed media artist in New York City, whose work is deeply rooted in lived experience and unspoken emotion. Using tactile expressionism, Anshu draws inspiration from travels in nature and memories reminiscent of childhood story-telling and social issues encountered as a girl growing up in a small Indian town. Trained as a scientist, Anshu’s unconventional path to art involves creating as a form of healing. Anshu’s work has been exhibited across New York and Miami.
Meenal Raghava is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores identity through the lens of rupture, resilience, and reinvention. Born and raised in India, her work draws on memory, displacement, and liminality to consider how we absorb and navigate the realities we inhabit. Working across painting and mixed media, Meenal uses oil, acrylic, concrete, epoxy, metal leaf, and gestural mark-making to create surfaces that embody accumulation and change. Through layering, erosion, translucency, and shifting fields of color, her materials echo processes of becoming: experiences gather, structures rupture, traces endure, and new forms emerge.
Curated by Hayley Ferber
Hayley Ferber is a Brooklyn-based independent curator, educator, and artist with a professional mission to support a creative community of multidisciplinary artists. She has served in the roles of Artistic & Development Director of the Pelham Art Center, Operations Director at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and Deputy Director of Chashama. Prior to this nonprofit work, Hayley taught Elementary Visual Art for over a decade.
