Pragati Gunasekar | Artist - What Lies Underfoot

No One Cares About Your Cast, 2025, 40 × 60 in, Oil & Acrylic on Cotton Canvas
A large-scale portrait of an NYC manhole cover rendered as a body marked by labor and endurance.

What Lies Underfoot

Labor, Climate Infrastructure, and the Hierarchies That Travel

The project connects these two worlds. Workers who shape a city they may never see, and workers within the city whose contributions go unacknowledged. This projects honors the value and dignity of its unseen workers.

As global climate catastrophe accelerates, I treat foundries, sewers, and streets as climate infrastructure, where extreme heat, toxic runoff, and floods are absorbed first by race- and caste-oppressed workers. The climate crisis is also a crisis of empathy and distance: the work asks who is asked to breathe the particulates, endure the heat, and live near slag/runoff so that other people can walk the streets without noticing what’s beneath their feet.

Not-enoughness travels: Not Brown enough in Delhi, India, not Black enough in Brooklyn, USA, Not White enough in Boston, USA

—same caste code, new ZIP…

This Project is Sponsored by NYFA

Your contribution helps sustain the ongoing creation, research, and exhibition of my project A Tax Paid in Flesh, fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) — 501(c)(3)

All donations made through NYFA are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law and directly support studio production, materials, and future presentations of the work.

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Installation View

Paintings, Installation, & Works on Paper

These works function as material studies—exploring erasure, imprint, pattern, and the residue of labor. Surfaces echo industrial textures and the pressures carried by urban infrastructure, while the forms reference bodies shaped by work, weight, and endurance.