Private promoters are taking Indian art to new frontiers

These days, private art promoters are playing a big role in pushing Indian contemporary art beyond national frontiers, pitch-forking new artists into international limelight and connecting them to the common man with quality aesthetics.

According to rough estimates,India has nearly 100 big and small private art foundations to promote contemporary art and culture - both in the country and abroad that fill a void precipitated by bureaucratic red-tape, legal tangles and official delays in government-sponsored art promotion drives.

This January, Delhi-based Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) helped 70 reputed Indian photographers exhibit a body of heterogeneous visual perspective of South Asia.

FICA sponsors an annual emerging artists' award, an eight-week residency programme at Montalvo Arts Centre in California, art workshops in schools across the capital, a public art grant, FICA group shows, research fellowships, group exchanges and an arts reading room in Delhi's Defence Colony.

The Harmony Art Foundation in Mumbai, founded by Tina Ambani, has been engaged in similar activities to promote contemporary Indian art for the past 15 years. Every year the foundation awards talented emerging artists from a countrywide list and plays host to an exhibition of contemporary art drawn from the list of submissions.

Gurgaon-based Devi Art Foundation, set up in 2008 provides a platform to contemporary artists and young curators to bring about a dynamic change in the viewership of art. It works with schools, colleges and professional institutions and galleries across India by involving students and young art aficionados in curatorial exercises, workshops and exposure to different genres of art.

The Delhi-based Art Mall owned by the Jain family that awarded young artists in April is another private initiative that takes young art to the masses at an affordable price and supports new artists.

Kolkata-based Emami Chisel Art, one of the biggest private auction houses in eastern India is currently engaged in a year-long artistic exchange with Sweden. It began with an Indian fashion show, Contemporary India, that unveiled 21st Indian fashion in smaller Swedish towns that still relate to India as a land of elephants and snake charmers.

Anmol Vellani of the Bangalore-based India Foundation for the Arts, a private art and culture promotion forum, says that, its very hard to argue that the government's involvement in the arts has been deleterious. But the shortcomings of government efforts to promote arts are common knowledge.