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Shathy Bano on The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour
February 2026
The Sainsbury Centre Learning Team, in collaboration with artist Shathy Bano, led a month-long community project with women from migrant backgrounds at St Matthew’s Church and Costessey Library. The project explored themes present in Monet’s work, including sanctuary, belonging, and the importance of a safe home.
Claude Monet’s The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil (1872) was exhibited at the Sainsbury Centre from 20 September to 11 January 2026 as part of The National Gallery’s Masterpiece Tour.
Alongside the display, the Sainsbury Centre Learning Team, in collaboration with artist Shathy Bano, led a month-long community project with women from migrant backgrounds at St Matthew’s Church and Costessey Library. The project explored themes present in Monet’s work, including sanctuary, belonging, and the importance of a safe home. Following this project, participants’ work has been displayed in the gallery space, with a reflective activity that encourages visitors to explore their own sense of belonging.
Shathy Bano is a Bengali British visual artist with an extensive background in social work and therapeutic community art. Shathy’s family migrated during the civil war between Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1971, when she was a child. Shathy’s work to date draws on her intersectional life experiences.
She explores the fluid nature of cultural identity, transformation, and loss through the generations, and the evolving, yet transitory, notion of home and sense of identity and place. Shathy uses participatory, interactive, and collaborative processes for her creative practice. Shathy is passionate about enabling access to art practice within art establishments, recognising the empowering and healing elements it provides.
She says, “It is important for individuals to be seen and heard and to receive acknowledgement, insight and understanding without an expectation to fit into ascribed criteria. A key aspect of belonging lies in the acknowledgment and valuing of cultural influence and diversity.”
Shathy has been interacting with the public throughout the exhibition, talking to visitors about the project, the artwork and the places that participants have come from. Hundreds of visitors have contributed their own expressions on identity through the core layers activity, creating connections and conversation, but also shifting ideas about who is creative and who belongs where. Shathy says, “we all belong here at the Sainsbury Centre.”
The exhibition runs from 13 January-15 February 2026.
Find out more here.
Photos by Kate Wolstenholme.