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Anitha N

@anithanreddy

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Art practitioner | Art historian
Siddi Quilts: Upcycled fabrics, layers of memories, geometric abstraction, stories of migration & assimilation

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Voodoo doll or haute couture icon? You decide.
Spotted just past the village bridge: a chili patch guarded by the chicest scarecrow this side of the reserve forest. She’s serving total runway drama in a vibrant yellow sari, dark fabric architectural hair, and—yes—a matching pink purse dangling off her wooden arm.
Naturally, I slammed on the brakes to inspect this masterpiece of spontaneous rural installation art. Meanwhile, the local audience on the porch was having a field day watching a city-slicker stranger doing a full-blown photoshoot for a scarecrow with a handbag. Cue the chorus of village laughter echoing across the paddy fields.
Turns out crop protection has a better sense of style than half the fashion week front row. by @anithanreddy

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12 days ago

The Uncertain

What happens when certainty changes the outcome?
When I began working with the fabric, I had certain ideas about where the pieces might sit, how the colours might meet, and what the composition could become. But working with the Siddi women has taught me that the moment I think I know where something is going, the work has already begun to shift.
A piece is moved. Another is rejected. Someone sees a relationship between two fabrics that I hadn’t noticed. A memory enters the conversation. The arrangement changes.
And so does my understanding of the textile work.
Perhaps this is what interests me most about patchwork—not the certainty of the final image, but the many possibilities that exist before it settles into one form.
The quilt holds those decisions, encounters and uncertainties within it. by @anithanreddy

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22 days ago

🧵 Whether you’ve been quilting for years or have never picked up a needle, there’s a place for you at the table.

Next Friday, experience an afternoon of art, culture, creativity, and community at NMOA’s Siddi Style Quilting Bee.

Alongside members of the Princeton Sankofa Stitchers Modern Quilt Guild, discover the vibrant textile traditions of the Siddi community of Karnataka, India, see Siddi-inspired quilts up close, and learn a distinctive quilting technique firsthand.

Then, add your own stitch to the story. ✨ Choose your fabric, learn something new, and create a quilt piece to take home. You’ll also have the opportunity to contribute fabric to a collaborative quilt created by Siddi women.

Come solo. Bring your quilting crew. Bring a friend who’s never tried it. We’ll provide the materials, you bring your creativity and curiosity.

📅 Friday, September 25
🕧 12:30–3pm
🎟️ Free with Museum admission
🧵 Materials provided | Ages 16+

Experienced quilters, curious beginners, and everyone in between are welcome.

Learn more at the link in bio.

📷: Measuring a Quilt, Photo credit: Anitha N. Reddy and Siddi quilter by @anithanreddy

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a month ago

My collaborative practice with the Siddi women of North Karnataka is featured in The Quilter, Journal No. 188, Autumn 2026.

The article, “Siddi Quilts: A Conversation with Anitha Reddy,” by Chitra Balasubramaniam, reflects on a decade of working with Siddi women through the making of quilts, drawing attention to Kawandi as a living textile practice and to the ways in which materials, memory, labour and lived experience intersect within the work.

The quilts are developed through a collaborative process in which textile fragments become carriers of personal and collective histories. Working with repurposed and surplus fabrics, the women make individual choices in the selection, arrangement and stitching of materials, bringing their own visual languages, memories and experiences into each work.

For me, this practice sits between contemporary art, material culture and community-based knowledge, while questioning fixed distinctions between artist, artisan, maker and collaborator.

Thank you to Chitra Balasubramaniam for documenting this ongoing conversation and for bringing the work and perspectives of the Siddi women into The Quilter.

Swipe through for excerpts from the article and a selection of the collaborative quilts.

📸 @anithanreddy / @armchairtextilejourney

#SiddiQuilts #Kawandi #TextileArt #ContemporaryTextileArt #CollaborativeArtPractice by @anithanreddy

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a month ago

The Siddi of Karnataka province in India are descendants of African migrants with a long history of quilting. Siddi women use fabric often sourced from family members that are pieced together to create colorful quilts with abstracted compositions. In the last decade, their collaborative work with Anitha Reddy has transformed their work to explore narrative, materiality, and self-representation. Their quilts document family stories, collective memory, and living history.

Join us on September 25th from 12:30-3:00 for our program to learn about their quilting techniques and rich cultural heritage. During this program we will explore textile traditions, sew, and share stories alongside members of the Princeton Sankofa Stitchers Modern Quilt Guild. You can even work on a quilt piece to take home.
@anithanreddy @pssmqg
Learn more on our website. Link in bio. by @anithanreddy

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a month ago

“I’m looking for an original Siddi quilt.”
I hear this question quite often.
And every time, I find myself asking: What exactly do we mean by “original Siddi”? And who gets to define that originality? by @anithanreddy

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a month ago

For me, the story begins with a piece of fabric.

I find it in cycle markets—discarded, forgotten, leftover pieces that have already had a life. I look at them not only for what they are, but for what they might become. A colour, a border, a faded print, a small fragment of cloth can hold the beginning of a new form.

But there are two processes that happen here.

Sometimes, I bring the fabrics together myself. I select, arrange, layer and compose them—putting colours, textures and fragments next to each other and allowing a form to emerge through my own way of seeing.

And then there is another process: I take the fabrics into the community, and the women choose for themselves.

They look, touch, sort, reject, select and combine. What I have brought is no longer simply my material or my decision. It enters their homes, their hands and their everyday lives. They decide what they want to take forward and what they want to leave behind.

In both processes, form comes before function.

A fragment finds another fragment. A colour asks for another colour. A border becomes a line. A small piece becomes important because of where it sits beside another piece.

Slowly, the form begins to reveal itself.

Only then does function find its place.

What begins as something discarded becomes a textile with purpose. But the purpose is not only about usefulness. The finished form carries choices, memories, relationships and the particular language of the person who has made it.

This is what interests me about working with the Siddi women.

I am not simply giving them fabric, and they are not simply following a design.

There is an exchange.

This is where I see form and function meeting—not as two separate ideas, but as two things growing together.

And now, when I bring fabrics into the community, I am increasingly aware that I am not bringing a finished idea. I am bringing possibilities.

The women decide what the fabric wants to become.

Perhaps that is what I value most about this practice:

I bring the material.
They bring the transformation.
The form emerges between us.
And the function finds its way. by @anithanreddy

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2 months ago

By the end of my house visits in one of the villages, the women told me, “The fabric is not enough.”

So we gathered in the village square and spread out what I had brought. Instead of choosing for them, I wanted them to choose for themselves—the colours, checks, prints and little pieces they wanted to take for their quilts.

I bring the fabric, but I don’t decide what the quilt should become. I facilitate, listen, and make space for their choices.

I often notice the siddi women in their 50s and 60s in wearing beautiful Dharwad cotton sarees—checks, stripes, earthy colours and combinations that I see less often among the younger women. I wonder how much of this everyday visual world quietly finds its way into their quilts.

That day, beneath an old banyan tree, beside a few bricks gathered for construction and the small village shrine, this ordinary village square became a place of choosing, sharing and imagining.

For me, this is the heart of working together: I bring the material; they bring their choices, memories and ways of seeing.

And somewhere between the two, the quilt begins to take shape. by @anithanreddy

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2 months ago

Last week, educator and artist Arzu joined me and the Siddi women I work with in the community as part of an unfolding practice.

Through the accordion book, Arzu introduced paper and mixed media as new materials—inviting the women to explore folding, layering, sequencing and storytelling beyond cloth.

For women whose practice is rooted in stitching, reuse and collective making, this became an opportunity to translate their knowledge into another material language.

It was not simply a workshop, but an exchange between Arzu’s educational practice, the women’s embodied knowledge, and my ongoing collaborative practice with the community.

A small shift in material opened up new ways of thinking, making and imagining together.

Unfolding knowledge. Unfolding material. Unfolding possibilities.

#UnfoldingPractice #AccordionBook #SiddiWomen #Kavand #CollaborativeArt CommunityArt MaterialExploration CollectiveMaking ArtEducation by @anithanreddy

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2 months ago

Do you love quilts?

Join us on September 25th from 12:30-3:00 to learn about the quilting techniques and rich cultural heritage of the Siddi community, an African diasporic group living in the Karnataka province in India.

During this program we will explore textile traditions, sew, and share stories alongside members of the Princeton Sankofa Stitchers Modern Quilt Guild. You can even work on a quilt piece to take home.

Learn more on our website. Link in bio.

Measuring a Quilt, Siddi Community, 2025, Photograph courtesy of Anitha Reddy a Siddi Quilter

Josephine Dakers‑Brathwaite, A Mother’s Light: Kawandi #3, 2025
Quilters cotton scraps, African cotton prints, Dupioni silk, Polyfil, cotton sheeting batting, 12wt cotton thread, embroidery thread, inkjet printer fabric image,
men’s shirting, fabric scraps, 17.75 x 15 in.
© Josephine Dakers-Brathwaite
Courtesy of Princeton Sankofa Stitchers MQG. Photo by Juandamarie Gikandi by @anithanreddy

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2 months ago

The philosophy of kawandi is often overshadowed by its aesthetic. As the practice travels and is reinterpreted, the focus can sometimes shift towards recreating its visual language with new fabrics, while its original ethos was rooted in reuse, resourcefulness, and everyday life.

Traditionally, kawandi was never made from saris alone. In Siddi homes, and in many rural households across India—not just in Karnataka—quilts were stitched from whatever textiles were already part of everyday life: old shirts, blouses, petticoats, children’s clothes, men’s garments, grandparents’ clothing, and many other worn fabrics. A sari, because of its size, often became the backing, while every patch carried the memory of a life already lived.

This way of making grew from the geographical and social realities of rural India. Villages were often far from markets, public transport was limited, and for families dependent on daily wage labour, travelling to town meant losing both time and income. Buying new fabric simply to make a quilt was rarely a possibility. Instead, every piece of cloth was valued, repaired, and given another life.

In my collaborative practice, one of my roles is gathering textiles from upcycling markets, factory rejects, tailoring units, boutiques, and other surplus sources before they are shared with the quilters. I see this not as replacing tradition, but as extending it. These fabrics carry their own journeys, connecting different geographies, industries, and material histories while remaining rooted in the original philosophy of giving cloth another life.

For me, kawandi is not only about cloth or stitching. It is about relationships—between people and materials, between memory and making, and between communities that continue to shape one another through collaboration. The quilt is not just an object; it is the outcome of shared engagement, lived experience, and collective care. by @anithanreddy

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3 months ago

The Price of Assimilation

What does it cost to belong?

The Siddi community in India has lived for centuries within social, political and caste structures that have simultaneously positioned them as both outsiders and insiders. Yet, within these unequal systems, they found ways to survive—not only through labour, but through observation, adaptation and making.

Kavand was not originally part of the Siddi community’s cultural practice. The skill was acquired by watching neighbouring communities while working in their homes and fields. It was rarely taught; it was observed, remembered and slowly adopted—not as an act of imitation, but as a way of negotiating everyday life within structures that excluded them.

Assimilation is often celebrated as integration. But what is its cost? What is lost, and what is transformed, when marginalized communities must adapt to dominant social, political and caste systems in order to survive?

Through my collaboration with Siddi women, Kavand becomes a site of inquiry rather than simply an object of admiration. Together, we ask: How is knowledge acquired, and who is recognized as its custodian? What is the relationship between adaptation and assimilation? How have caste, labour and social hierarchies shaped what is remembered as tradition—and what is forgotten?

Rather than offering answers, the quilts invite us to question inherited narratives about identity, authorship, belonging and power, revealing how creative practices can both reflect and quietly unsettle the structures that have shaped them.

#siddikavand #communityart #materialculture #socialhistory #slowmaking by @anithanreddy

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3 months ago