Many Visions, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India

Press Release

An exhibition featuring the work of various contemporary artists from four major indigenous artistic traditions in India will be on view in the University Galleries in the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts at William Paterson University in Wayne from November 2 through December 11, 2015. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on November 1 and November 15 from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Sunday, November 1 from 2 to 4 p.m. A panel discussion will take place on Wednesday, November 18 from 4:15 to 5:30 p.m. in the University Galleries. 

This exhibition endeavors to increase the appreciation and understanding of indigenous art from India, which is rarely displayed in the United States. Indigenous art gained global attention in 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art presented the major exhibition Primitivism in the 20^th Century – Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which defined primitivism as a Western response to tribal cultures through the work and thought of modern artists. In response, the Centre Pompidou in Paris organized a groundbreaking exhibition on indigenous arts in 1989. This exhibition demonstrated to Western audiences the powerful expressive skills of numerous indigenous artists and introduced to the Eurocentric art world five Indian artists. The initial international exposure led to several other Indian tribal and folk art exhibitions in India and around the world. 

On view at the William Paterson University Galleries, this exhibition showcases four of the most prolific communities producing indigenous art in India: the Gond and Warli tribes, and the Mithila and Chitrakar communities in the states of Bihar and Bengal, respectively. The works are drawn from the Ethnic Arts Foundation Collection and BINDU modern, home of the Sunanda and Umesh Gaur Collection. 

Gond art emerged among Pardhan Gonds, a priestly community within the Gond tribe, which is centered in Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India. A broadly unifying theme in their art is the all-inclusiveness of nature. The deities of the Gond pantheon, Gond spirituality, and their rich mythology and folklore are intimately connected to the natural world, and are richly depicted in their paintings. 

Warli art is practiced among the Warlis who live in the Thane district of Maharashtra, a state in western India. Their art derives from a wall painting tradition dating back to the Neolithic cave paintings of central India between 2500 and 3000 B.C. The images are complex and focus on auspicious iconography for marriages. Warli artists rely on only white paint and earth tone hues, unlike the broad array of colors seen in much of Indian art. 

Women from the Mithila region of Bihar, a state in eastern India, created paintingsdepicting images of gods and goddesses on the interior walls of their homes for domestic rituals since at least the 14^th century. Today, Mithila artists include a few men and they are also dealing with contemporary social, political and feminist issues in their paintings. 

Patua or Chitrakar communities in West Bengal, a state in eastern India, have been itinerant painters and singers of stories for many generations. Traveling from village to village, they unroll their colorfully painted scrolls one frame at a time, narrating the frames through song, using traditional folk tunes. The subjects of the Bengali patua scrolls and the accompanying songs range from mythological narratives to social and political issues, as well as to local and world events. 

Divided into four broad thematic sections, this exhibition demonstrates the common cultural roots and contemporary concerns of these four communities that are both deeply rooted in Indian civilization and culture. The exhibit’s four broad themes are: Myth and Cosmology, Nature—Real and Imagined, Village Life, and Contemporary Explorations. 

The Myth and Cosmology section illustrates the rich and diverse pictorial languages used by the artists in the four communities to express the continuing hold and power of myths, symbols and spiritual traditions that are often an amalgam of both Hindu and indigenous world views. 

Nature—Real and Imagined reflects the centrality of nature in the life, myth, religion, culture and society of the four communities. This section explores the many ways that conceptions of nature are manifested in the lives and imaginations of the artists and their communities. 

Village Life includes paintings that intimately convey the rhythms and realities of rural life, and how the village lives on in the hearts and minds of the artists who have made their homes in cities. 

Contemporary Explorationsshows thatno matter how rooted in rural villages the artists in the four communities are, they are also keen observers and original commentators on contemporary urban life and modern realities. Current events and sociopolitical expressions characterize most of the works in this section. 

The 34 exhibiting artists include Anwar Chitrakar, Monimala Chitrakar, Montu Chitrakar, Swama Chitrakar, Santosh Kumar Das, Baua Devi, Chano Devi, Jamuna Devi, Shanti Devi, Sita Devi, Suresh Kumar Dhurve, Amit Dombre, Manisha Jha, Rani Jha, Pushpa Kumari, Ruby Kumari, Shalinee Kumari, Balu Jivya Mashe, Kishore Sadashiv Mashe, Naresh Kumar Paswan, Shivan Paswan, Ganga Devi of Ranti, Gopal Saha, Bhajju Shyam, Jangarh Singh Shyam, Japani Shyam, Mayank Shyam, Rajendra Shyam, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, Dhavat Singh, Manoj Tekam, Ram Singh Urveti, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad and Durga Bai Vyam. 

The exhibition is co-curated by Aurogeeta Das and David Szanton. Das earned a Ph.D. in Indian art from the University of Westminster, London. She has written on indigenous art for various publications, and recently spent three months in India doing further research on art in indigenous communities. She is now completing research towards a biography of the late Gond artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. Szanton is a social anthropologist based in Berkeley, California, with a long-standing interest in the dialectics of art and social change. He has been following the evolution of Mithila artists and Mithila painting since 1977. In 1980, he co-founded the Ethnic Arts Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustaining the Mithila painting tradition. Over the years, the Ethnic Arts Foundation has purchased some 1,800 paintings from more than 150 artists. It has organized numerous exhibitions and sales in the United States, South Africa, India, and even Iceland. Additionally, Szanton has curated numerous exhibitions in the United States, South Africa and India, winning a national curatorial prize in 2005. 

Umesh and Sunanda Gaur have been collecting modern and contemporary Indian art for more than two decades. The Gaur collection is based in Franklin Park, New Jersey at the BINDU modern gallery, which presents rotating exhibitions from the Gaur collection. BINDU modern is also the nucleus from which the Gaurs continue their decade-long activities of promoting modern Indian art through engagement with museums, art scholars, and the community. 

In conjunction with this exhibition, a panel discussion will be held on Wednesday, November 18 from 4:15 to 5:30 p.m. in the South Gallery. Participants include: Maya Chadda, PhD, William Paterson professor of political science; Umesh Gaur, PhD, collector and co-founder of BINDU modern; David Szanton, PhD, co-curator and co-founder of the Ethnic Arts Foundation; and He Zhang, PhD, William Paterson professor of art. Balmurli Natrajan, PhD, William Paterson professor of anthropology, will moderate the panel. 

This exhibition is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The William Paterson University Galleries are wheelchair-accessible. Large-print educational materials are available. For additional information, please call the William Paterson University Galleries at 973-720-2654.