Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
By Smita Sen
Sen has shown her work internationally in Dubai, U.A.E., and throughout New York
City, at venues like Anthology Film Archives, the Knockdown Center, ISSUE
Project Room, Heath Gallery, The Sump/Poppers Locarno, and LeRoy Neiman Gallery
(Columbia University). In 2018, Sen was a fellow at the Mildred’s Lane residency. That
same year, she was also the recipient of an Instigator Fellowship from New York
University’s ITP Camp. Sen was a Visiting Artist at the Bard College Disturbance Lab
and has given presentations and workshops at Bard College, Columbia University,
NYU ITP Camp, and LRLX NY. Smita Sen is the Creative Director of Into the Shell, the
first project from Sen Studio, a multimedia studio collaborative of artists and engineers.
In 2019, she will be joining the faculty of Choate Rosemary Hall as Visual Arts Teacher.
In her spare time, Sen enjoys writing. She is the recipient of the Academy of American
Poets College Prize and the Karen Osney Brownstein Writing Prize, and has been pub-
lished by the Academy of American Poets (2016).
Sen graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University (2016) with a BA in the
Visual Arts.
I cannot say enough about the mentors who encouraged me to continue exploring in
my art the questions that would arise with my father’s illness. Thank you to
Serra Victoria Bothwell-Fels, for your continued guidance in sculpture, performance,
and life. Thank you to my enormous and generous community of friends and family
that cared for us and supported us in the last weeks of my father’s life and in the weeks
that followed. Your love carried us through. Most importantly, thank you to my
mother, brother, and father. We displayed the great depths of our courage in our
darkest days. I love you.
Sarah Wolfson 9
Cleo 13
Monique Williams 18
Maeve Tobin 22
Iliana 25
Vanessa 28
Anna 31
Appendix 35
Despite this, he was right. Caring for others is demanding. To care is to understand.
And to understand someone else is to see yourself in that person. Every flaw, every
insecurity, every problem and every self-doubt. The process of caring for someone
else has always required a confronting of self. An awareness of self. A reassuring,
too. And sometimes she went there with them, mentally, physically. She tore herself
apart just so they could see that that they were not alone. just so they knew that
they were understood. In you, I could see me too.
Truly caring for others can easily become a self-sacrificial process. In you, I could
see me, but that’s why I almost lost myself. Tore myself apart, just so I could find
the right piece, the right part. to put you together again. I’m strong enough for the
both us. I have enough love for the both us. I just need to save you, then I can save
myself. But I was wrong. I failed. And I couldn’t find my way back -
I didn’t know where they ended and where I began.
But, you see, in tearing myself apart, what i did find was that little girl inside me
again, still waiting. But this time she was upset. with her sister, her friends, her
family… but mostly with me. She was screaming she was still waiting. Waiting to
be cared for in the way that she cared for. In the way she saw me care for everyone
else. She whispered, “All those times you recognized darkness in them, you thought
about them, you cared for them, you reassured them. But you forgot about me.
What about me?”
“You’re fine. You’re strong. You’ll be okay, you know that.”
But those words weren’t enough. She would no longer wait patiently. No matter
how I tried to calm, placate or soothe. This child was defiant. She wouldn’t be
silenced. So I fought. Soon, after years of dryness, tears came easy. After years of
numbness, feelings came flooding. I couldn’t tell the difference between the dark-
ness and the light. I was lost.
Since then, I’ve realized that every time I’ve tried to heal someone, it was because
I saw me or my sister in them. And I subconsciously hoped that by helping to heal
them, I could get closer to healing her, and myself. But the weight of that hope
stretches far beyond any one person. Because no matter how many people I con-
Vitaliano, Peter P., et al. “Is Caregiving a Risk Factor for Illness?” Current Directions
in Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 1, 2004, pp. 13–16. JSTOR, www.jstor.
org/stable/20182897.
Walker, Alexis J., et al. “Informal Caregiving to Aging Family Members: A Critical
Review.” Family Relations, vol. 44, no. 4, 1995, pp. 402–411. JSTOR, www.
jstor.org/stable/584996.
Book cover, print layout, and web publication were all designed by Smita Sen using
Adobe InDesign.
AARP
www.aarp.org Lotsa Helping Hands
https://lotsahelpinghands.com/
Alzheimer’s Association
https://www.alz.org/help-support/caregiving National Alliance for Caregiving
www.caregiving.org
Alzheimer’s Foundation
https://alzfdn.org/caregiving-resources/ National Adult Day Services Association
https://www.nadsa.org/
American Association of Caregiving Youth
https://www.aacy.org/ National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers
www.caremanager.org
ARCH National Respite Network
https://archrespite.org/ National Institute on Aging’s National Alzheimer’s Education and Referral
Center
Caregiver Action Network (CAN) https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/alzheimers
https://caregiveraction.org/
National Long-Term Care Clearinghouse
Caregiver Support Services http://longtermcare.gov/
www.seniorcaregiversupport.com
Next Step in Care: Family Caregivers and Health Care Professionals Working
Caring.com Together
http://www.caring.com http://www.nextstepincare.org/
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmit-
ted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or
mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the artist, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses per-
mitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the artist, addressed “Attention:
Manipura Permissions,” at the address below.
Smita Sen
333 Christian Street
Wallingford, CT 06492
www.smitaksen.myportfolio.com
In this new work, Manipura: Of Flowers and Bones, Smita Sen attempts to uncover
the answers to these questions. The work includes beautiful essays by diverse contrib-
utors who have experienced myriad forms of caregiving. Interpreting each story into a
complex, 3D-modeled sculpture, Sen offers a new vista into what healthcare looks like
beyond purely professional medicine.