The Bull, the Elder, and the Bus Driver: How Assembled Cities Got Here
- Shrey Purohit
- 15 hours ago
- 6 min read
My solo show at Root Division's Frank Ratchye Project Space runs through August 1. This is the longer story of where these paintings came from, and where they are headed.
Eight years ago I moved from Mumbai to San Francisco, and I thought I left that city behind. Turns out it followed me into everything.
Walk into the Frank Ratchye Project Space and the first thing that grabs your eye are not a usual row of paintings. It is a wall of rust-orange lace, the kind of curtain that hangs in family homes in Mumbai, patched and overlapped, tassels at the hem. Set into the middle of it is Mumbai in 1,995 CE & Indus Valley Elder from 2,000 BCE. A golden terracotta elder, cracked down the forehead, stands eyes closed in front of a packed Mumbai train platform under a sign that reads AZADI. Freedom. A speech bubble by his mouth says "Revolution incoming... seen 1857." He has watched empires come and go. The commuters flooding the platform behind him, unclear whether they are in support or are against.
That title and every title in this show works, describing the location and histories of the prominent subjects in the paintings. Most paintings carry two dates. A CE date from my lifetime or my cities' lifetimes, and a BCE date from the Indus Valley, the civilization that built planned cities on the subcontinent four and a half thousand years before I was born in one. For eight years I have painted San Francisco one frame at a time, in the American realist tradition, fog and dusk and wet pavement. These paintings refuse the single frame because they are also refusing the single date. None of it fits into one view, and that is the point. A rich city is what these canvases look like: lives, cultures and memories stacked on top of each other, half of them from somewhere else, from some other time.
The clearest statement of the system is the smallest. Two 12 by 12 canvases hang as a pair: Mumbai 1,997 CE & Indus Valley Bull from 2,800 BCE and San Francisco 2,018 CE & Indus Valley Bull from 2,800 BCE. The same red bull appears in both, drawn like a Harappan seal and outlined in white like neon. In one it stands over a blue Mumbai night. In the other, over San Francisco. 1997 is the year I was born. 2018 is the year I arrived here. The bull does not change. It walked out of a 4,800 year old time period, stood by both of my cities, and did not break stride.
The pairing holds my family's story too. In the 1940s, as the independence movement surged and communal riots tore through their home region, my family was forced to leave everything and start over in Mumbai. Eight decades later I left Mumbai for San Francisco, chasing a better life rather than fleeing for one. The circumstances are not equivalent and I will not pretend they are. But both moves scattered us the way wind scatters seeds, and that is what diaspora literally means. The word comes from the Greek for a scattering of seeds. A seed does not ask permission of the soil it lands in. It carries everything it needs and grows where it falls. The bull on those two canvases is the seed my family has been carrying for 4,800 years.
The divergence itself is on the wall too, and honestly dated. Rose in the Wind All Around the Bay is signed '23, the oldest work in the room. Bay Bridge at sunset, a pink house on a wet street, a single rose floating over the water, the sky broken into stacked color panels with visible palette knife texture. This is where the collage impulse started, in early 2023, in a group show called The City That Knows How at Moth Belly Gallery. I was showing collage-style acrylics there for the first time, paintings where San Francisco's landmarks shared the canvas with the people who make the city alive, because I had noticed something about cityscapes: they can be awe-inspiring and deeply isolating at the same time. The scale of a city's monuments overshadows the colorful lives lived inside it. One painting from that show was a self-portrait at three ages, myself as a kid with my grandfather, at eight, at twenty-five, set against the Golden Gate Bridge as it looked in 1933, half-built, scaffolded, raised by thousands of hands and public will. The bridge was once baby-like too. That was the seed of everything in this room: politics and history folded into paint, sometimes obviously, sometimes hidden, and the conviction that no one and nothing in a city is self-made.
Rose in the Wind is placed right opposite to SF Past, Futuristic Path & Tools from 35,000 BCE and you can see three years of that idea sharpening. In the newer painting, Sutro Tower is reimagined as a place people can actually live, balconies and lit windows climbing its red steel legs, while a driverless car hit by a truck behind a stone mortar and pestle the size of a house. The oldest human tool in the show sits calmly beside the newest and chaotic one.
Then there are the two paintings I care about most, because of where they point. Ron's life from Army to MUNI gives a bus driver the treatment this city reserves for tech founders: Ron behind the wheel in gold light, the World's Fair glowing beside him, his Victorian, his harbor, his own words painted into a speech bubble. A man no one looks at twice on his route, sharing a frame with the fair that once announced San Francisco to the world. Bob's Life as a Painter & Tiler does the same for Bob, eating breakfast in front of palm trees and the house he worked on, his tile pattern turned into a field of diamonds behind him, old masters sketching in his memory cloud. These are not cityscapes with figures in them. They are portraits where the city is the supporting cast.
Left, Bob's Life as a Painter & Tiler. Right, Ron's life from Army to MUNI.
I will say the quiet part. Ron and Bob are the hinge between this show and the next two years of my life. The San Francisco Arts Commission funded Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City, eighteen large portraits of the workers who keep this city running, through 2028. That grant came out of the 2023 collage paintings and repeated rejections teaching me to put people back at the center, and out of paintings like these two proving the thesis: a city is made by the people who move through it, and they deserve the monument treatment.
Mining the Landscape makes the argument in reverse. A Gold Rush headline shouts GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! while a teeny-tiny firetruck goes about its actual work beneath the bridges. We mythologize the extraction and forget the labor. The next body of work exists to correct that.
Come stand in front of the lace wall before August 1. The light moves through it differently every hour, and no photograph I have taken does it justice. I am often in the building, my studio is upstairs. Come say hi.
Visiting the Exhibition
Assembled Cities · Frank Ratchye Project Space, Root Division, 1131 Mission St, San Francisco (SoMa, one block from Civic Center BART) · Through August 1, 2026 · Gallery hours Wed–Friday 12–6pm, Sat by appointment · rootdivision.org
Works in the show: Mumbai in 1,995 CE & Indus Valley Elder from 2,000 BCE, oil & acrylic on canvas with terracotta curtain, 24 x 24 in, $2,400 · Bob's Life as a Painter & Tiler, oil & acrylic, 30 x 36 in, $4,200 · SF Past, Futuristic Path & Tools from 35,000 BCE, oil & acrylic, 30 x 36 in, $4,200 · Rose in the Wind All Around the Bay, oil & acrylic, 24 x 30 in, $2,800 · Mumbai 1,997 CE & Indus Valley Bull from 2,800 BCE, oil & acrylic, 12 x 12 in, $550 · San Francisco 2,018 CE & Indus Valley Bull from 2,800 BCE, oil & acrylic, 12 x 12 in, $550 · Ron's life from Army to MUNI, oil & acrylic, 30 x 36 in, $4,200 · Mining the Landscape, oil & acrylic, 24 x 30 in, $2,800
For inquiries: info@rootdivison.org or view artworks for purchase.
More at shreypurohit.art ·
The Postcard Club: shrey.art/club
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