The world’s largest institution of 18th to 20th century Indian art offers an unparalleled glimpse of the eclectic diversity that has powered art practices in the subcontinent.
The Right Ambience
for Viewing Art
DAG has always ensured an immersive art-viewing experience with its galleries and museum-exhibitions located in thoughtfully designed spaces with an underlying sensitivity towards architectural accents.
The Right Ambience
for viewing Art
DAG has always ensured an immersive art-viewing experience with its galleries and museum-exhibitions located in thoughtfully designed spaces with an underlying sensitivity towards architectural accents.
A one-stop destination
for Indian art
India’s largest art institution with commercial galleries to acquire art and build collections, museum collaborations to view collections, and a range of programming and services that provide a comprehensive platform for the art collector, viewer or art lover.
A one-stop destination
for Indian art
India’s largest art institution with commercial galleries to acquire art and build collections, museum collaborations to view collections, and a range of programming and services that provide a comprehensive platform for the art collector, viewer or art lover.
A one-stop destination
for Indian art
DAG has always ensured an immersive art-viewing experience with its galleries and museum-exhibitions located in thoughtfully designed spaces with an underlying sensitivity towards architectural accents.
ON VIEW
India's Rockefeller Artists
An Indo-US Cultural Saga
India’s Rockefeller Artists showcases iconic works of the Indian painters and sculptors who travelled to the US on philanthropic grants from the JDR 3rd Fund (1963–1979) and later through the Asian Cultural Council. These artists were exposed to American art and shared their own learnings and experiences through these enriching cultural exchanges. The show examines how and why these artists were selected; their relationships with each other and the American art milieu; the impact of the experience on their work; and the creation of a community of Rockefeller artists.
This exhibition draws on the rich collection of early photographs of Indian monuments in the DAG archives to foreground photography’s powerful role in shaping our understanding of India’s history. It shows how photography helped to build the field sciences, by creating networks of information flow, and draws attention to the interconnected histories of politics, fieldwork, and the framing of academic disciplines, especially archaeology. Selected by guest curator Dr Sudeshna Guha, the material on display represents the many different objects that were created through photographic technology. In covering a chronological span stretching up to the first two decades of the twentieth century.
From being vilified as the goddess of the ‘thugees’ under the British to becoming the subject of Ramakrishna’s ardent worship and popular teachings, the worship of Kali has undergone dramatic change in the Indian subcontinent. During the nationalist period, Kali was invoked as a symbol of rebellion, by Aurobindo Ghosh and Subhash Chandra Bose to urge their followers to fight against imperialist forces. Equally, disenfranchised groups of tribals under Jitu Santhal, peasant communities, trans persons, women and Dalits, householders and devotees have turned to Kali as their champion within India’s complex and uneven caste and gender matrix. Divided into sections, the exhibition traces Kali’s pervasive influence across the subcontinent.
What can one say of M. F. Husain except that he was singularly unique and truly the face of modern Indian art. He represented Indian art around the world for much of the twentieth century in ways inventive and delightful, as also evocative of India’s syncretic past and its vibrant culture and contemporary society. DAG acknowledges the contribution of this genius and much-loved artist and the great legacy of art he has left behind with Husain: The Timeless Modernist. Opening 26 October 2024 at DAG, New Delhi.
Contours of Identity: Francis Newton Souza & Avinash Chandra
What did Western audiences expect of Indian artists living among them in the mid-twentieth century? How did F. N. Souza and Avinash Chandra respond to their expectations? How did they see themselves as artists and as Indians? With Contours of Identity: Francis Newton Souza & Avinash Chandra, DAG celebrates Souza’s centennial birth anniversary with a tribute featuring him and fellow artist Chandra. Opening 14 November 2024 at DAG, Mumbai.
DAG’s Apprenticeship Programme was designed to offer opportunities to students and art lovers to participate in the exciting world of galleries, museums, arts organisations and festivals by exposing them to the whole gamut of activities that go into creating programmes around exhibitions and festivals. The current paid apprenticeship opportunity is organized around DAG's festival 'City as a Museum' 2024.
Started as a part of DAG's Museums Programme, Art Lab, a travelling pop-up museum, has now travelled to six schools across West Bengal, reaching out to a diverse group of learners across private and government schools. Art Lab creates an immersive learning space in schools, where students explore history through art from DAG’s museum collection, and take on the role of researchers, artists, and curators—remaking the exhibition over two weeks.
Enjoy 10X Rewards when you buy pre-modern and modern Indian art from DAG, India’s most renowned art company with a large selection of works by Indian masters covering a span of over two hundred years, at its galleries in New Delhi and Mumbai using your American Express Centurion®️ and Platinum Cards. We welcome you to contact your art advisor today. T&C apply.
Complementing the elegant architecture of the reception and the hotel lobby at The Pierre, New York, a Taj hotel, in Manhattan are works from DAG’s collection of modern masters on display in the public areas—among them paintings by G. R. Santosh, Rabin Mondal, and Shanti Dave, reflecting the New York hotel’s Indian heritage.
Collaboration
ART AND INTERIORS
Real estate giant and a patron of the arts, Raiaskaran, collaborates with DAG to bring the finest of Indian art to Turner House, an intimate collection of luxury offices by the real-estate giant. From driveways, lobbies, conference rooms and other common areas, Turner House will exhibit exceptional art pieces from the DAG collection featuring the best pre-modern and modern Indian art.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
DAG ACQUIRES THE 75-YEAR-OLD JAMINI ROY HOUSE IN KOLKATA TO OPEN INDIA’S FIRST PRIVATE SINGLE-ARTIST MUSEUM
In 1949, Jamini Roy moved from his modest Baghbazar home in north Calcutta to the genteel neighbourhood of Ballygunge Place, at the time an open area with bungalows in a neighbourhood occupied by professionals. Here, as his practice grew, so did his family, and the artist added rooms and floors to the home in which he lived till his passing away in 1972. Four years later, the Government of India declared him a National Treasure artist. In March 2023, the historic home of India’s most loved modernist was acquired by India’s most respected art company, DAG, for the express purpose of creating India’s first world-class private single-artist museum and cultural resource centre on the life, work and times of this pioneering artist.
India has a lacuna of professionally run private art museums and there are no professionally run single-artist museums in the country, a gap that DAG hopes to fill with the restoration of the 75-year-old historical house with the help of conservation architects and designers. The Jamini Roy House Museum is envisioned as a tribute to the artist, and the values of simplicity, creativity and universalism that he espoused.
Journal: Edition 11
In this issue of the Journal, we take stock of various artistic responses to the present. We take a look at how partition impacted the networks of popular art, especially highlighting the presence and absence of Islamic subjects in this domain, through a conversation with Tasveer Ghar’s Project director, Yousuf Saeed. We continue our ongoing conversation with the historian Swati Chattopadhyay on her reading practices for understanding the social uses of public space. We round-up the year with profile interviews of award-winning artists Jogen Chowdhury and Aban Raza, two artists committed to translating the existential and political uncertainties of our time onto their canvases.
We also take a closer look at Gopal Ghose’s life and work, as DAG opens a major show on the artist’s works over a lifetime. Also featuring our Term of the Month: the uses of ‘calendar art’ in the wider context of unifying a temporal order for a new nation post-independence.
Digital Museum Initiatives
DAG takes a significant step towards its vision of making art accessible for all, allocating over 180 artworks and archival artefacts from the collection to its Museums Programme. With the launch of the new website, these works are now on view online.
The works on view as a part of the digital museum are drawn primarily from DAG’s historic collection of Bengal art, ranging across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It provides a unique resource for art lovers to explore the evolution of art in the region, at a time when Calcutta became a hub for global exchanges as the capital of the British Empire. Starting with experiments with academic art in the early days of the colony, the collection traverses the artistic developments of the Swadeshi period and the tumultuous years before and after Independence. In addition, there are a range of photographs and objects from DAG’s archives, presented as capsule collections that delve into specific micro-histories, and open up new areas of research.
Accompanied with illustrated stories, timelines and videos this growing online collection brings the museum experience into our homes and is envisioned as an enduring resource that can be savoured over time for learning, analysis and simply for the love of art!
The Art Lab is a travelling, popup museum that takes art into schools, making DAG’s extensive collection directly accessible to young people. Over two weeks, students immerse themselves in the exhibition and take over as artists, researchers, and curators to create their own museum. The exhibition is modular by design, and by the end of the process it takes a completely different shape and form as students intervene with their ideas and creative expressions.
Art Lab also engages with the wider community, with students across different classes, parents, local officials, and partner schools who visit the exhibition on Open House days when the classroom is teeming with the energy and engagement of a busy day at the museum. As a part of Art Lab, DAG also offers a workshop for teachers where they explore simple tools for integrating art in their lessons, and build shared knowledge about art based pedagogies.
Started in Kolkata in April 2022, Art Lab has now travelled to six schools, adding a Bengali module for first generation learners so that the programme can be accessed widely, across socio-economic barriers, as the museum travels across the country.
Four latest issue of the Journal we focused on a thematic of travel and mountains. Both have provided ample opportunities and sites of experimentation for Indian artists to push their skills in representing views that are not easily seen by most. We travelled to the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York too, to give you a glimpse of this peripatetic artist and writer's contribution to American life and art, as he made fragments of the Himalayan world and its diverse cultures available to Americans.
We also spoke to Carol Huh about an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art that focuses on Indian contemporary photographers who study landscapes and feature Indian artists who sketched their way to the hills, including M. V. Dhurandhar and Benode Behari Mukherjee.
ART DIALOGUE
VIDEO
ARTISTS (UN)SCRIPTED
Films and videos on art, artists, walkthroughs, presentations and panel discussions
