Founded in 2009, the Asia Art Archive in America serves as a vital center for collaboration, research, and scholarship focused on modern and contemporary art from Asia and the Asian diaspora. In 2025, the Vilcek Foundation awarded AAA in America a grant to support their operations and programs, including the exhibition “mould the wing to match the photograph”: The Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive in Conversation with Sreshta Rit Premnath. 

The exhibition showcases the Asia Art Archive’s collection of prominent Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee. Known for her experimentation with form and materiality, Mukherjee used natural hemp and jute fibers to create sculptures that appear to defy gravity. The exhibition contains a single sculpture by Mukherjee along with materials from her personal archive. These are juxtaposed with a series of commissions by contemporary Brooklyn-based artist Sreshta Rit Premnath. Originally from Bangalore, Premnath uses woven materials to evoke borders, fences, and boundaries—permeable and policed planes and lines drawn to constrain bodies. In conversation with one another, these artists’ works are a powerful discourse on embodiment, otherness, migration, and belonging. They examine how the archive actively reconfigures the understanding and experience of Mukherjee’s work.

Outside of this exhibition, the foundation’s grant will support the archive’s operations and programs, including panels, lectures, and initiatives with contemporary artists and art historians including Abang-guard, Umber Majeed, Zishi Han, Wei Yang, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Murtaza Vali, among others.  

A sister organization to the original Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, AAA in America strives to make the archive and its materials accessible to the public. The organization maintains and offers an open-access reading room in a historic carriage house in Brooklyn Heights. Visitors are free to peruse over 5,000 monographs, exhibition catalogs, reference books, periodicals, and audiovisual materials.

The Vilcek Foundation was first introduced to Asia Art Archive in America founder Jane DeBevoise and the archive by gallerist, curator, and Art Projects International founder Jung Lee Sanders. The 2025 grant was proposed and championed by Vilcek Foundation Board Member Andrew Jonas Sanders.