AINA Gallery is pleased to announce its launch in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, establishing a permanent destination for non-Western modern and global contemporary art. Located in the heart of New York’s art community, AINA Gallery will present solo and thematic exhibitions alongside historical retrospectives. AINA Gallery was previously known as Aicon Art and operated on Great Jones Street for close to 20 years. The new space on West 29th was designed by studioMDA and built by F&S Contracting.
Derived from the Persian and South Asian concept of the mirror (aina /آئینہ), AINA Gallery is an exhibition space dedicated to reflection and global artistic dialogues. The gallery serves as a looking glass through which non-Western modern and contemporary practices are celebrated in New York. AINA’s curatorial program specializes in South Asian modern masters from the twentieth century alongside cutting-edge contemporary artists working across South Asia, Africa, and their global diasporas.
"AINA Gallery was conceived as a space of clarity and synthesis," says the founder, Prajit Dutta. "New York has long been a global nexus for artistic exchange, yet non-Western modernisms and contemporary artists of the Global South continue to be underrepresented and deserve a dedicated, uncompromising platform on this stage. There is a depth of culture and history that has been left unexplored to their full potential outside of the Western framework, and our mission is to present these artistic movements with the scholarly depth and high-level presentation they demand.”
To mark its inauguration, AINA Gallery will present Other Stories—A Genealogy for the Present, featuring rare works by seminal twentieth-century masters alongside new works by leading contemporary voices. Curator Atreyee Gupta explains that the “exhibition takes Rasheed Araeen’s seminal 1989 Hayward Gallery exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain as both a historical point of departure and a critical proposition.” (Dr Gupta is Associate Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley and Co-Editor of Postwar Revisited—Towards a Global Art History with Okwui Enwezor, 2025.)
Featuring stalwarts of the celebrated Hayward show including Rasheed Araeen, Avinash Chandra, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Aubrey Williams, and Francis Newton Souza, the current exhibition expands beyond the borders of Britain to include important diasporic modernists Ernest Mancoba, Mohan Samant, Krishna Reddy, and Zarina Hashmi. Like their counterparts in Britain at the time, these artists “contributed to a vibrant cultural milieu even as their work remained at a slight remove from the dominant narratives.” The contemporaries include Rekha Rodwittiya, Surendran Nair, Veer Munshi, Sujith SN, Faiza Butt, Peju Alatise, Victor Ekpuk, Rachid Koraïchi, Khadim Ali, and Saad Qureshi—artists represented by Aicon Art and now AINA Gallery—who occupy distinct regional, political, and formal positions.
In addition to its primary exhibition program, AINA Gallery will publish scholarly exhibition catalogs, host public lectures, and collaborate with international curators, academic institutions, and private collections to foster deeper engagement with non-Western art histories.
AINA Gallery will welcome the public starting October 1, 2026.
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