Posted on 17 July 2026:
Mirrors: Distance Between Worlds — Diaspora Artists Shana Sood and Yolanda Peña Mazzoni
BRING INDIA, CUBA AND AMERICA TOGETHER AT BIKANER HOUSE, NEW DELHI
There is a distance that cannot be traced on any map—the space between memory and belonging, between languages carried and languages adopted, between the imagined self and the lived one.
Mirrors: Distance Between Worlds, opening at Bikaner House, New Delhi this July, embodies this intimate and generative distance through the works of two diaspora artists, Shana Sood and Yolanda Peña Mazzoni –in dialogue under the curatorial vision of Georgina Maddox.
Though shaped by different geographies—India, Cuba, and the United States—Sood and Mazzoni converge through realist paintings that echo both distance and resonance. Their works are positioned between continents and generations, mapping the fragile terrain of belonging and the quiet strength of womanhood. Each canvas becomes a mirror, not of likeness, but of cultural interplay—revealing contrasts in values and aesthetic traditions while uncovering unexpected overlaps.
New Delhi–based arts writer and curator Georgina Maddox’s curatorial lens situates the exhibition as a visual barometer of diaspora, measuring the subtle shifts between heritage and contemporary identity. Sood’s Indian roots and Mazzoni’s Cuban–Spanish lineage entwine in a dialogue that contemplates how women artists navigate layered cultural belonging. The exhibition is not merely a display of art but a meditation on how memory and migration shape artistic practice.
Beyond the Canvas
An artist–curator interaction on 24 July 2026 at 5:00 PM invites audiences deeper into the creative process, offering insight into the journeys that inform these works.
Here, the exhibition expands into conversation—an intimate exploration of how personal histories become collective memory, and how art becomes a vessel for diasporic identity.
Though Shana Sood and Yolanda Peña Mazzoni were raised in entirely different corners of the world, their canvases meet in a shared preoccupation: migration, memory, identity, and the quiet, defiant business of being a woman who belongs to more than one place at once.
Two Artists, One Conversation Across Continents
Shana Sood, born and raised in New Delhi before relocating to the United States in 2005, and Yolanda Peña Mazzoni, whose heritage traces back to Cuba and Spain, did not set out to make the same painting twice. Instead, Mirrors function as what its creators call a “visual barometer” — a way of mapping where their values, belief systems, and aesthetic traditions overlap, and where they diverge entirely.
“It is a show about cultural distances — between countries, between generations and between selves,” says Shana Sood.
“Our works delve into similar themes but emerge from deeply rooted and vastly different cultural contexts.”
For Yolanda Peña Mazzoni, painting has always been less about depicting the world and more about understanding her place within it.
“Painting gives me a way to document my life: portraits, places, moments, and inner landscapes,” she says. “It helps me understand what really matters.”
Shana Sood: Painting a Remembered India
Shana Sood’s canvases are populated by women in traditional dress, rendered in oil with a precision that feels almost tender — quiet, grace-filled figures who nonetheless radiate a kind of unshakeable resolve. Though self-taught, her work has been shaped over years of disciplined practice and by artists she admires deeply, among them Amrita Sher-Gil and Matisse.
Family responsibility once delayed her path into art, but her recent solo exhibitions in India have felt like a homecoming — both personal and artistic. “Delhi is a sensory explosion,” she reflects. “Its colors, textures, and stories are endless. Himachal, where my roots lie, provides a counterpoint: quiet, meditative, vast.”
Red recurs across her canvases — not decoratively, but as a language of its own. It is, in her telling, a color of memory, of passion, of cultural belonging: a bridge strung between where she came from and where she now stands.
“Being an Indian artist in the USA offers a freedom to explore identity without rigid constraints,” she says. “At the same time, I carry the imprint of the past. My art seeks to reconcile both.”
Perhaps most striking is her candor about the nature of diasporic imagination itself.
“My canvases often reflect a romanticized version of India that lives only in my mind,” she admits. “But perhaps that is the nature of diaspora art — to live between what was and what is, and to find beauty in that liminal space.”
Yolanda Peña Mazzoni: A Painter’s Meditation on Connection
Yolanda Peña Mazzoni’s road to the easel wound through architecture before it led her fully into painting. A graduate of the New England School of Art and Design, she built a career in interior architecture at firms including Gensler, all while her love of painting quietly persisted alongside it. She later returned to formal artistic study at the Rhode Island School of Design and The Art Students League of New York, and has participated in workshops with respected painters such as Wolf Kahn, Alex Kanevsky, and Elias Rivera.
Today, alongside her painting practice, she serves as Managing Director of Client Services at Artists for Humanity, where she channels her belief in creative potential into mentoring the next generation. Her paintings have found homes at the Imago Foundation for the Arts, Galatea Gallery, Patriots Place Art Gallery, and Zullo Gallery.
Her current body of work turns toward a single, expansive idea: connection. “Our lives are made meaningful by the relationships we form with people, places, ideas, and communities,” she explains. “This series is a painter’s meditation on those connections.”
Why “Mirrors”?
The exhibition’s title is deliberate. A mirror does not simply reflect — it reveals, distorts, and sometimes clarifies what direct sight cannot. Placed side by side, Sood’s and Mazzoni’s works don’t merge into a single narrative; instead, they hold up divergent visual vocabularies to one another, each catching something of the other’s light. What emerges is an intimate mirroring of ritual and inheritance — two women, two histories, one shared meditation on what it means to carry a homeland inside you while building a life somewhere else entirely.
Together, their work invites viewers into a larger, deeply human conversation: about migration and memory, about the women who hold both past and present in the same hand, and about the emotional architecture that diaspora quietly builds in all of us. Mirrors: Distance Between Worlds is, in the end, both a conversation and a communion — between women, between cultures, and between the inner and outer worlds that artists inhabit.
Exhibition Details
- Exhibition: Mirrors: Distance Between Worlds — Shana Sood and Yolanda Peña Mazzoni
- Curator: Georgina Maddox
- Dates: 23–29 July 2026
- Venue: Bikaner House, between Pandara Road and Shahjahan Road, near India Gate, New Delhi
- Timings: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
- Opening Evening: 23 July 2026
- Artist–Curator Interaction: 24 July 2026, 5:00 PM onwards
Visitors are invited not just to view the works but to step into the conversation themselves — to stand between two worlds, as the artists do, and find, perhaps, a reflection of their own.
