Erasing Borders at the Queens Museum of art

Curated by Vijay Kumar the exhibition, Erasing Borders: Passport to Contemporary Indian Art of the Diaspora explores the contributions of artists whose origins can be traced to the Indian Subcontinent. This 6th annual Erasing Borders exhibition will be on view through October 11.

Participating artists: Niyeti Chadha Kannal, Nandini Chirimar, Khalil Chishtee, Neil Chowdhury , Pritika Chowdhry, Anjali Deshmukh, Anujan Ezhikode, Indira Freitas Johnson, Asha Ganpat, Ina Kaur, Adil Mansuri, Divya Mehra, Samanta Batra Mehta, Indrani Nayar-Gall, Jagdish Prabhu, Antonio Puri, Alka Raghuram, Gautam Rao, Amin Rehman, Tara Sabharwal, Pallavi Sharma, Mumtaz Hussain, Reeta Gidwani Karmarkar, Haresh Lalvani,

Alakananda Mukerji, Veru Narula, Prince Varughese Thomas

Director of Exhibitions: Amina Begum Ahmed

Opening Reception Schedule:

2PM: A conversation between Mary Birmingham and the Artists

3PM: Music by Amir Elsaffar and Friends

About the Presenting Organization

The Indo-American Arts Council’s mission is to promote and build the awareness, creation, production, exhibition, publication, performance of Indian and cross-cultural art forms in North America. IAAC’s focus is to work with artists in North America as well as to facilitate artists from India to exhibit, perform and produce their work in the United States. This exhibition will promote and exhibit the work of artists from the Indian diasporic community. This exhibition will tour the NYC boroughs, the greater NYC area and other parts of the United States.

About the Curator

Vijay Kumar has curated the 2nd , 3rd and 4th annual Erasing Borders exhibition in consultation with Aroon Shivdasani, Executive Director of the IAAC. Vijay studied art at Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi, and at Pratt Graphics Center in NYC. He has showcased his drawings, prints and paintings in the U.S. and abroad. Vijay has worked extensively in printmaking techniques and currently teaches etching at Manhattan Graphics Center in NYC, where he was a founding member. His work is featured in many permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library (all in NYC), the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, Connecticut, the National Gallery of Art in New Delhi, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK. In 2002, his work received the highest prize in an exhibition of prints by the Royal Society or Painters and Printmakers in London.

Color photos from pre Soviet Russian Empire!

The Empire that was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated



The treasures hidden in the library of Congress always amaze me when they come to light on the web. What else lies buried there?

Art show looking back at India blends reality, vivid fantasies

Detroit News Story!

Michael H. Hodges / Detroit News Arts Writer

With "Contemporary India," Gallery Project considers the art of the Indian diaspora -- often of the first generation of children born in this country, far from the ancestral home.

The artists' reception for "Contemporary India," a group show running through Sept. 20, is Friday evening.

Works by the 14 artists span the creative spectrum, often appropriating traditional motifs to apply to untraditional ends.

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Photographer Neil Chowdhury, 42, was raised in the Detroit area, and didn't visit his father's homeland until he was an adult.

The work he shot over one year attempted to reconcile his vivid fantasies from childhood with what he calls an often-jarring "masala mix of complexity, misery and beauty."

"Street Madness" is a montage crowded with overlapping, impossibly layered photos. The work, Chowdhury says, was prompted by an inability to capture the visual depth and confusion of India's great cities with his straightforward documentary work, also on view here.

And to be sure, the maddening crush of Indian life is one of the mostly common reactions one hears from the first-time visitor. "It's actually one of my less-clever titles," he says.

Chowdhury, who heads the photography department at Cazenovia College outside Syracuse, N.Y., acknowledges the universality of response behind "Street Madness," but adds that however stereotypical-sounding, the press of humanity is perhaps the defining element to urban life.

"I was trying to deal in one image not just with the density," he says, "but also the hierarchical nature of society." Indeed, the montage begins at the bottom with the wretched who are sleeping on the street, while images of Bollywood greats smile serenely far above, some caught (characteristically) in mid-embrace -- a nice, ironic substitution of the secular for the religious.

"At this point in history," says Chowdhury, "it's the Bollywood stars who are minor deities."

Also well worth a look in the exhibit is Bari Kumar's "Esse," a portrait of the classical multi-armed Indian god, albeit in this case headless. The half-naked figure sports sea-green skin and two arms raised in a pose that can't help but call crucifixion to mind.

mhodges@detnews.com (313) 222-6021

And now

I really need to get around to writing all the nice folks that I photographed in June....It would be great to do some video interviews and make more portraits. Summer's trickling away. Website updates, keywording my photo archive so I can do subject searches through my images, scanning old negatives, working on at least a few new collage pieces....etc. etc. etc. What should be a relaxing summer ends up stress filled adventure of too many goals and not enough time. Breathe. I keep telling people to meditate and take yoga classes. Argh! One more thing to fit in. Does laying on the front porch sofa looking at the trees drop sap onto my car count?

starting something new

SA_32, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

For the past eight years, my creative efforts in photography have centered around my interest in exploring my Indian heratige. Last summer I spent six weeks in Mumbai, photographing casual laborers on the streets. While a new Indian middle class enjoys the fruits of a recent economic revolution, there remain those who make their living by providing simple services on the streets for a few rupees. One can get a shave and haircut on almost any street corner in India for 30 rs. (about 40 cents). There are plenty of cobblers, earwax cleaners, fortune-tellers, shoe shiners, umbrella fixers, bicycle mechanics, tire repairmen, pan vendors, as well as legions of small street stalls selling every imaginable item at rock bottom prices. These vendors in this informal street economy endure heat, dust, and police harassment as they sell their services and wares in makeshift stalls or hard fought patches of sidewalk, and often spend their nights sleeping in the same places. These casual laborers still make up a large part of India’s economy, but they are ignored by the legions of pedestrians, until the bargains they offer are just too good to pass up, and then a sudden evening crowd gathers, jostling for space, fingering the goods, and driving hard bargains that enable the vendor to eat another day. I hope that my portraits will enable viewers to take another look and notice these often ignored individuals.

The next chapter of my own experience during the summer of 2009, would bring me to Islin, New Jersey and Jackson Heights, Queens, NY. Forty years ago, my father made the journey from India to Great Britain, where he finished college and married my mother, then to the United States, with my infant self in tow. In this country he made a new and very different life from the one in which he grew up. At that time, there was no Little India within an American city or town, and my father had left his friends and fellow countrymen behind, to start a new family without the comfort of any reminders from his own culture. This experience has changed for newer immigrants, as within the last 20 years, Indian enclaves have formed, which create a community assists those who have newly arrived in the United States, and provide a cultural continuity and familiarity to the South Asian Diaspora.

With this new body of work, I focus on the workers who have traveled from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the South Asian ethnic enclaves in New York and New Jersey that make up “Little India.” Here I met many South Asian people who have created a life in a new country. Having had to give up familiar customs, friends, family and country for a chance at what they dream will be a better life, people in these areas have created a new community for themselves, adapting the customs they left behind to life in a new climate and country. I want to make portraits of these people as they work and live in this new environment, creating their own history and traditions in an adopted land. I can’t help but wonder how life for my own family would have been different, had such a community been available when we made the same journey.

Shame! I forgot all about this blog. Well, here's some new work....

Erasing Borders 2009

I'm going to be in this show:

http://www.iaac.us/erasing_borders2009/index.htm

The opening is tomorrow at the Dowd Fine Art Gallery in Cortland, NY. Later it travels to several other venues:

INDO-AMERICAN ARTS COUNCIL



in collaboration with



DOWD GALLERY




is delighted to present



IAAC ERASING BORDERS 2009

EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ART OF THE DIASPORA

OPENING RECEPTION

Sunday, March 1st 2009 2-5pm

DOWD GALLERY CORTLAND NY, Special Guest: Consul General of India Prabhu Dayal



Participating artists: Niyeti Chadha Kannal, Nandini Chirimar, Khalil Chishtee, Neil Chowdhury ,



Pritika Chowdhry,
Anjali Deshmukh, Anujan Ezhikode, Indira Freitas Johnson, Asha Ganpat, Ina Kaur,

Adil Mansuri,
Divya Mehra, Samanta Mehta Batra, Indrani Nayar Gall, Jagdish Prabhu, Antonio Puri,

Alka Raghuram, Gautam Rao,
Amin Rehman, Tara Sabharwal, Pallavi Sharma, Preet Srivastava,

Mumtaz Hussain,
Reeta Gidwani Karmarkar, Haresh Lalvani, Alakananda Mukerji, Veru Narula,


Prince Varughese Thomas



Curated by Vijay Kumar

About Dowd Gallery & Directions

State University of New York
College at Cortland,


Dowd Fine Arts Center, Room 162
Cortland, New York 13045

Exhibition Dates Feb 27 - April 30 There will be several public programs and events related to this exhibition, The exhibition will travel to other venues immediately after the Dowd Gallery.



Please see schedule for details.

The Indo-American Arts Council is a 501 ©3 not-for-profit arts organization passionately dedicated to promoting, showcasing and building an awareness of South Asian artists in the performing arts, visual arts, literary arts and folk arts. For information please visit www.iaac.us



Indo-American Arts Council Inc. 517East 87th St, Suite 1B, New York, NY 10128. Phone: 212 594 3685


Email: admin@iaac.us. Web: www.iaac.us

Gershwin Hotel hosts India Pop Art Festival

Here's an article about the Gershwin India Pop Festival in the Indian Star Online!

http://www.theindianstar.com/index.php?uan=10144

New York: The Gershwin Hotel and owner Suzanne Tremblay hosted New York India Pop from February 5-8. The cultural event showcased the vibrancy of pop art in an emerging market while also unveiling the new Kama Sutra Suite at the Gershwin Hotel.
Over 20 artists from India and the USA participated in the event.
Indie-rock group, Alms for Shanti headed by Uday Benegal with guest Naren Budhakar on tabla, and a dance performance by Sonalee Vyas Dance Company kicked off the celebration.
The art exhibition included James Banta, Neil Chowdhury and Asha Ganpat, while artists (Tara Misra, Kevin Robinson and Asha Ganpat) added their unique mark to the new Kama Sutra suite in the hotel. Actress Geeta Citygirl served as a host-emcee.
On Feb 6 at the Punjabi Punchlines Evening, comedians Dan Nainan, Vidur Kapur and Anu Kalra judged amateur comedians. On Feb 7, Mira Nair presented her 1996 movie Kama Sutra, The Tale Of Love followed by a Q&A where she discussed her work as a filmmaker.
The New York City Bhangra Club dancers led by Megha Kalia, with DJ Troy and Dhol player Madan Madi brought the packed house to their feet with their inspired performance.
The hotel's artist-in-residence program has assisted over 60 artists from around the world. Some of the more famous artists include Andy Warhol's Factory People.
In 2007, Suzanne Tremblay, owner of the Gershwin, organized a reunion for these superstars including Ultraviolet, Lou Reed, Eric Anderson, Mary Woronof, Susan Bond, Taylor Mead and Brigit Berlin.
The Gershwin Hotel also accepted voluntary donations to support the work of two organizations - Project Nanhi Kali www.nanhikali.org and the Polaris Project www.polarisproject.org.

Video about Alms for Shanti

They played at the Gershwin India Pop Festival where I showed my work this past month, along with many other artists of the Indian Diaspora. Watch carefully for the cameo appearance of me and my art!

video in progress.....

This is a rough clip from a video piece I'm working on. The final version will be in HD resolution for projection, and will be 9-12 Minutes long. I shot all the images in this clip this summer in Mumbai. The finished video will also include scenes from many other parts of India, as well as lots of graphics, popular commercial and religious imagery, postcards, etc. from around India. Much editing to do!

fast India clip

fast India clip, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between photographs and memories. The thing that has stopped me really about writing a blog has to do with the specificity of both. Rather than talk about the things that are on my mind, or post the images that I capture from day to day, I wonder about the appropriateness of sharing private memories in a semi public forum. Some of my favorite readings are in the journals of Anaïs Nin, but I can't help but wonder how the subjects of those narratives would have felt had their most intimate moments been splashed out on the internet for all to see. Images are so much more personal than that, and so much less as well. So what we do in a public forum either becomes a formalist exercise in light and color, or else a sort of professional selection of images that are deemed appropriate, and somehow express our feelings in a general way, or tell a story of what we have seen of others' lives, without revealing too intimately our own in a specific way. This is called art, or documentary photograpy, a poetry of images, done in good taste. I wonder about this. Of course the boundary of good taste is ever shifting. Now it's fashinable to post images of whomever you've just slept with, even mid act. Thanks to Nan Goldin and your many spritual children for sharing your memories, and giving me the opportunity to ponder the nature of trust, and privacy, and its relation to intimacy. I've always loved that work, and sure, I have my own photostream of a similar nature. It's just that you are not going to see it. We are going to have to stick here to the things that I remember seeing and was lucky enough to capture in film or pixels, that bring about the atmosphere and memories of those more personal moments, which I'll try to keep to myself, thanks, as much as possible in the narcissistic environment of a personal blog. My photography has been largely more about the places and people to which my curiosity about others brings me, anyway. The camera has given me a way to look at the world that is outside of myself, and freeze it long enough to ponder.

_DSC5917

_DSC5917, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

I don't know this spam guy on the scooter, or the woman behind him with the camera, or the smiling dude on the right in the hat. It's just a bunch of strangers at the NY State Fair, and quite random that this should be my first blog posting.