About

Salma Arastu

b. 1950 Ajmer, Rajasthan, India
Lives and works in Berkeley, California

Education

MFA, Maharaja Sayajirao University
Baroda, India – 1974
BFA, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University,
Hyderabad, India – 1972

Bio

Salma Arastu is a Berkeley-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, calligraphy, poetry, and performance. For more than five decades, her work has explored spirituality, identity, and interconnectedness through layered abstraction and meditative mark-making.

Born into a Sindhi Hindu family displaced by the Partition of India, and born without fingers on her left hand, Arastu turned to art early as a source of resilience, agency, and self-definition. These formative experiences continue to inform a practice rooted in endurance, transformation, and spiritual inquiry.

Arastu has produced an extensive body of work that includes over 2,000 paintings, three public art sculptures, seven books of art and poetry, and more than sixty solo exhibitions worldwide, alongside over two hundred group exhibitions. Her work has been shown internationally across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

After earning her degree from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda in 1974, Arastu lived and worked in Iran and Kuwait for a decade, where her engagement with Islamic spirituality and calligraphic traditions deepened. She immigrated to the United States in 1986 and later relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. The events of September 11, 2001, further sharpened her focus on themes of unity, healing, and shared humanity.

Now in her seventh decade, Arastu remains deeply committed to an active studio practice—continuing to create work that bridges cultures, belief systems, and ways of knowing.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is rooted in spirituality, lyrical lines, and layered textures. Through painting, drawing, and mixed media, I explore the possibility of unity—between people, cultures, belief systems, and the natural world.

Each work begins with a line. These lines are both physical and spiritual gestures, emerging through a meditative, repetitive process that fills the surface with rhythm, texture, and energy. The act of making is intuitive and embodied, allowing the work to unfold slowly through accumulation and reflection.

My practice draws deeply from Arabic calligraphy, South Asian miniatures, and folk traditions, alongside Western approaches to abstraction. Over time, I have developed a visual language that bridges Eastern spiritual philosophies with contemporary painterly techniques. I work in evolving series, allowing each body of work to grow organically from the previous one.

My recent work explores mycelial and microbial systems as metaphors for interconnection, resilience, and unseen networks of life. This direction incorporates scientific research alongside my longstanding spiritual inquiry, expanding my process to include both investigation and intuition.

In the studio, discovery is a daily practice. Each work invites me to move fearlessly into the unknown, remaining open to new forms, new visions, and the quiet mysteries that emerge through sustained attention.

Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Awards

Selected Bibliography

Public Art

Selected Public Collections

Talks and Presentations

Curatorial Experience

Publications