The Making of an Artist as Social Commentator was a survey of Nirmala Dutt’s socially conscious artistic practice from 1967 to 1998. The exhibition featured her earliest Kenyataan (Statement) series, the first series in which the Dutt felt compelled to use her art to as a tool for social commentary, by documenting the children and environment of a local slum over the course of several years. Alongside this was shown her mixed-media collage paintings documenting her responses to the humanitarian crises around the globe propitiated by the raging Cold War. In these paintings, she collaged Xeroxed news clippings across the canvas and slashed them with powerful strokes of her paint and roller brush, communicating the strength of her indignation and frustration. Putting the local and the global together, the show demonstrated that injustice, ironically, does not discriminate—that chaos and misery can exist in our own backyard, undocumented by the sensationalist news cycle.