Arts
I Them Differently
Art is how people tell their stories through their craft.
From the Taj Mahal, India’s architectural triumph, to timeless Sufi songs from Pakistan, South Asian Americans are creating lucrative career sby embracing their artistic heritage.
Artist Avani Patel, who grew up in the United States and earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Temple University in Philadelphia, hails from a family of art lovers. “I grew up in a family of actors. In India my relatives acted in theater and musical performance, or what is known here as Broadway shows,” she says.
She dedicated her lively and colorful painting, titled “Life to Be,” which was displayed at the annual Erasing Borders art exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art in New York to her late father. “My dad passed away last year. It was very difficult to see where life was going for me and how to move on. This painting represents my father,” she said.
Avni Patel, Life to Be.Seventy-year-old artist Vijay Kumar, who curated the Erasing Borders exhibit for the tenth consecutive year, ruminated on his lifelong relationship with art, “I’ve participated in this exhibit and other art shows until now because I’ve been an artist since I was a kid and I know nothing else.”
He attributes his passion for the arts to his roots: “Lucknow in India is my hometown. There, we not only love art, but we also love talking and meeting people.” He recalled listening to Urdu poetry while growing up in Lucknow and also having the world-renowned Kathak dance maestro, Pandit Birju Maharaj, as his next-door neighbor. “I call him Birju Bhaiya,” Kumar muses.
Graphic designer by day, Smrita Jain, exhibited black-and-white photographs of the Goddess Durga. “Photography is my hobby,” she said. She channeled her passion for the arts into graphic design and photography and is head graphic designer for an international company and co-founder the New York City-based Sumrit Gallery.
Jain spent six years photographing the step-by-step process it takes to create deities of the goddess Durga. She spoke with poor craftsmen, artists in their own right, whenever she went to New Delhi. She self-published a 112-page paperback chronicling her conversations with the artisans, titled “Creating Durga” in 2013.
“I knew the book was going to be very exclusive and that I would not be selling hundreds. Then strangers started buying it from Amazon. I even had someone from Canada purchase it,” Jain said.
Sunil Garg, Creation Myth,The book features glossy photographs, both color and black and white, with intermittent quotations from the artists and blurbs describing the steps involved in creating the deity of the Goddess Durga. She wanted to keep the book focused on the art of sculpting a deity rather than on details of the religion that inspires them.
Unlike Jain, who found artistic inspiration during her trips to India, artist Tara Sabharwal’s homecoming is solely to visit friends and family. “I was born and raised in India. I’ve lived there all my life. I know that some other South Asians have a more complicated relationship with their heritage. They don’t necessarily feel Indian, but are referred to as Indian, when they just feel like someone else,” Sabharwal said.
Patel, who grew up in the United States, is one of those who struggled with her identity. She initially gravitated towards western artists.
“My professor told me this was not me. ‘There is more to you,’ he would say. I thought, what is he talking about? There’s more to me?” said Patel.
She didn’t know what to make of her professor’s advice, until she closed the books on famed European artists like Matisse and started listening to cathartic melodies of Hindi film songs and Carnatic compositions that reminded her of the music her sister would dance to at Bharatnatyam recitals.
In the transition from books to music, uncommon amongst the academic-respecting South Asian diaspora, Patel found her artistic point of view. While listening to Indian music, Patel had created a mural of patterns. Her professor walked in by chance when he caught sight of the mural.
“My professor said, ‘See, this is you…Asia.’ This experience made me understand where my work is coming from,” Patel said.
Mumtaz Hussain, Adam’s Rib.
She now pays attention to details in textiles and architecture while visiting India so that she could draw on their idiosyncrasies and incorporate them into her art.
Unlike Patel, however, Sabharwal says: “I go to India to meet my friends and sometimes to showcase my artwork. ‘Tara the artist’ has no start or end. Art is my whole life’s purpose. It’s all the in between spaces; like looking through the corner of my eye while talking and noticing light and colors from which I make connections and find meaning.”
Still, both artists agree that regardless of whether artists South Asian descent travel to the homeland, the art they create is always influenced by their heritage. “We in the diaspora always go back to our own roots,” Patel said.
Upon visiting galleries in India, Patel observed that professional artists who never left India were worlds away from artists in the South Asian diaspora. She said that Indian artists, who frequently have their work heralded at museums in metropolitan cities like Mumbai and New Delhi, rarely ever pay homage to the cultural traditions they were exposed to as native Indians.
“I definitely see a difference between artists in India and artists here. They are exposed to the culture firsthand in India, but sometimes the artists there try to become so western. They’re not showing what we have to offer in India,” Patel said.
Kumar, who teaches printmaking in New York City, concurs, adding that Indian artists do not have the dedication and passion possessed by their non-resident Indian counterparts. “I’m not saying artists have to struggle or should starve. There should, however, be devotion. In Hindi it is called sadhana,” Kumar said.
“One instance I will never forget in my life was when I visited a gallery in India and saw the work of a famous minimal abstract artist from the West — his work consisted of two or three colors on a canvas. Then on the bottom I see Krishna playing bansuri,” Vijay recalled.
“It is awful. The original artist killed himself and this Indian artist copied someone else who went through a miserable struggle to create that art,” Kumar said.
Patel said that successful artists amongst the diaspora “show how they’re influenced from eastern and western culture; how they feel and represent themselves as artists when combing East and West together.”
Kumar points to Tara Sabharwal’s artwork as an example: “Tara tells her own life stories through colorful etchings and prints. She doesn’t do very big work. She does small pieces and puts them together. It’s a narrative work.”
Sabharwal’s work consists of etchings with nature as the theme. She created a portfolio of 15 drawings of rain after the death of her husband. “Through the theme of nature, I am saying something about grief and the idea of renewal. Rain represents an outpouring of grief, but also cleansing that leads to a new tomorrow,” she said.
“Art is how people tell their stories through their craft,” Kumar said. For artists of the South Asian diaspora, that means erasing the borders of their dual identity.