Phoenix Art Museum receives a $5 million gift for new galleries of Sri Lankan and South Asian art

The Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona has received a $5 million gift from philanthropist Sukumar Nagendran, as The Art Newspaper reports. The funds will serve to expand the Asian art galleries, as well as for new acquisitions, scholarly research and public programmes focused on the art of Sri Lanka.

The expansion will increase the “Art of Asia” gallery space from about 6,000 to 10,000 square metres, through the renovation and reuse of existing spaces. At the centre of the project will be the new 2,000-square-metre “Nagendran Gallery for the Art of Sri Lanka and South Asia”, which will honour the donor and his years-long connection with the museum. Nagendran says the gift aims to deepen cultural understanding, inspire future generations and help preserve and elevate the art of Sri Lanka.

Nagendran is an Arizona-based philanthropist, physician and biotechnology executive, president and head of research and development at Taysha Gene Therapies. He was introduced to the museum a decade ago through philanthropists Coleene and Barry Fernando, who have donated more than 130 works and photographs of South Asian art and supported exhibitions such as “Guardian of the Flame: Art of Sri Lanka” (2003) and “Legacy of Ceylon” (2021). Nagendran has also supported civic projects in Sri Lanka, including the construction of medical facilities and schools.

The museum holds more than 21,000 works, of which over 4,000 historical and contemporary works come from artists who live, work or originate in Asia — making it one of the leading U.S. institutions for Asian art. Director Jeremy Mikolajczak told The Art Newspaper that Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing and most internationally connected cities in the U.S., and that its cultural identity is being redefined by expanding Asian communities; according to him, Nagendran’s gift marks a critical point for the city’s cultural capital.

In November, the museum will inaugurate the new gallery with the exhibition “Pala Pothupitiye: Mapping a Sri Lankan Consciousness”, curated by Tushara Bindu Gude. Pothupitiye is a Sri Lankan artist who explores the spaces between castes, spiritual and secular worlds, and ancestral craft and contemporary art, also confronting the social and political effects that the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial occupations — from the 16th century to the mid-20th century — left on Sri Lanka. His work — sculpture, assemblage, painting, mixed media and altered colonial maps — will be set against historical Sri Lankan art from the museum’s collection, including illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts, Buddhist sculptures and mid-20th-century photographs by Quintus Fernando.