Vikesh Kapoor is a multidisciplinary folk artist whose work examines race, class and identity as a first-generation American. He utilizes photography, video, poetry and songs.
His work seeks to locate the individual within the broader context of the American experience. It’s an awareness that is both personal and political, prompted in part by the turbulent national discourse on immigration and who is truly American.
Kapoor has exhibited his series See You at Home in solo exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia PA; Filter Space, Chicago, IL; and New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery, LA. He has been included in group exhibitions at Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; Houston Center for Photography, TX; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA; and SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA, among other venues.
He has received fellowships and awards including the inaugural Google Image Equity Fellowship, the Silver Eye Center for Photography Keystone Fellowship Award, Daylight Photo Award, The Hopper Prize, LensCulture Art Photography Juror's Pick Award, PhotoNola Review Grand Prize and Project Development Grant from CENTER.
In 2026, he will make his major museum debut at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian as part of The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today.
Kapoor was an artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project in 2024, Latitude Chicago in 2020 and the Center of Photography at Woodstock, NY in 2019.
He is a full member of Diversify Photo.
Statement
Vikesh Kapoor is a multidisciplinary folk artist whose work examines race, class and identity as a first-generation American. He utilizes photography, video, poetry and songs.
His work seeks to locate the individual within the broader context of the American experience. It’s an awareness that is both personal and political, prompted in part by the turbulent national discourse on immigration and who is truly American.
Kapoor’s current body of work, See You at Home, is an ongoing personal narrative that centers on family, memory and the myth and melancholy surrounding the American Dream. His parents immigrated from India in 1973, settling in a small town of 10,000 people in rural Pennsylvania. While they left for a better life, the shift from a collectivist nation to an individualistic one led to isolation just as much as it led to freedom.
The project explores the dichotomy of home and homeland, freedom and isolation, collectivism and individualism. It illustrates this liminal space through contemporary photographs of his parents’ life in Pennsylvania, imbued with memories of their past: family album photos, VHS home videos and love letters.
The first major wave of Indian immigrants arrived in America in the 1960s, and is just now beginning to grow old. What does the pursuit of the American Dream look like at the end of life? And where is the depiction of the South Asian family in America? Kapoor’s hope is that See You at Home resonates with other first-generation Americans and all those seeking to find place and purpose here.