Mapping Memories with Piyaali B. Samanta

Overview:

Location: Linn Studio behind Triton Museum of Art

Join us for a 1-day workshop at the Triton Museum this Spring and make your own personal collage of your Memory Map. Under the guidance of guest artist Piyaali B. Samanta, explore the nature of memory and how personal stories of family, heritage, and environment influence your identities and consider the deeper themes that connect us in the community.

Cut out the maps of neighborhoods, states, and countries you have called home, bring pictures from your phone or family album that connect you to your hometown, and let your creativity guide you in exploring your home, roots, and communities for your “Mappa Mundi.”

Materials:

All necessary art supplies are provided by the museum for use during the workshop. Workshop attendees are encouraged to print and bring their photographs, maps, magazine cutouts, or paper materials that they would like to incorporate into their collage. Please print on regular copy paper or even better if it’s on rice paper. More information will be sent to registered attendees.

What is a “Memory Map”?

The workshop invites you to create a map of your world from memory, making a collage of your drawings, photographs, maps, and words that don’t need to be accurate. The workshop is created by Piyaali which uses techniques and concepts of identity mapping, mind maps, and “Mappa Mundi” (Medieval European maps of the world). She used these concepts to create her personal Memory Maps and her “My Mappa Mundi” series of paintings.

Why May 10th?

This workshop is inspired by World Collage Day! In 2018, Kolaj Magazine initiated this annual celebration of the art of collage and encourages artists and art venues to participate. This year it falls on May 10th, 2025, and we are excited to highlight this day. Learn more about it here: https://kolajinstitute.org/worldcollageday

The Triton Museum may cancel a class, camp, or workshop due to weather, health, an emergency, or low attendance. In those cases, the registered attendee will be notified of the cancellation as soon as possible and will be offered a refund or credit for the class.

The Triton Museum reserves the right to use photographs taken during classes and workshops for publicity and media purposes. This includes but is not limited to the Triton website and social media. If you do not want yourself or your child included in these photographs, please notify Triton staff at the time or enrollment.

Questions? Please contact education@tritonmuseum.org

Artist Biography:

Piyaali is an Artist and Architectural Designer. Her Art is born from a connection to nature, nostalgia, and personal experiences, she is influenced by her cultural roots in India and her background in Architecture. She takes inspiration from mythology, philosophy, history, folk art, architecture, and natural landscapes. Her artworks are layered with her varied experiences, she aspires to merge conscious storytelling and symbolism with the universal language of abstraction blended with recognizable realism. She combines the East with the West, reflecting her hybrid identity, the spiritual to the aesthetic, the ancient philosophy, and iconography to modern narratives. She is engaged in community art education programs, volunteering with various non-profit art organizations/museums, and conducting art classes and workshops in the Bay Area.

Piyaali’s current work explores the concepts of home, community, and roots and how they shape our identity. She investigates themes of nostalgia, human relation to spaces, man-made built forms, landscapes, and how the natural world influences the human psyche. She is in the process of working on a series that maps memory, identity, her family’s migration, culture, and history through mythology and folk-art imagery depicting flora, fauna, landscapes, and architecture of the places she has lived; creating her identity map in a painting series called “My Mappa Mundi.”

Website: http://piyaalibsamanta.com/