A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Duke University Press, 2019) constructs an account of contemporary art and criticism in India by interpreting the historical and ongoing work of two seminal figures: Vivan Sundaram, the New Delhi-based contemporary artist, and Geeta Kapur, the critic, curator, and most significant interlocutor of the post-1968 avant-garde generation to which Sundaram belongs.
Saloni Mathur is the author of India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (University of California Press, 2007), editor of The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (Yale University Press/Clark Art Institute, 2011), and coeditor (with Kavita Singh) of No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: Modalities of the Museum in South Asia (Routledge India, 2014). She has also published broadly in a range of interdisciplinary journals and magazines, including Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Art History, Art in America,Critical Inquiry, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, New Formations, and Third Text, and has received awards and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut/Max Planck Institute in Florence. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research in 1998, and is presently associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.