Bangalore’s new Museum of Art and Photography is far more eclectic than it sounds.
As its founder Abhishek Poddar explains, the non-profit private museum that will open on December 11 has six categories in its collection, including textiles and design.
“It could have been the Museum of Art and Design, or the Museum of Art and Textiles. But you can do a lot more with [the acronym] MAP than MAD or MAT,” says the Indian businessman, who runs an 80-year-old family tea business and a chemicals and explosives company.
The simple, practical, 44,000 sq ft (4,100 square metre) building that houses the museum is in the “museum quarter” of Bangalore, just outside Cubbon Park, a historic green space in the heart of the southern Indian metropolis.
Kolkata-born Poddar has lived in Bangalore – which is the centre of the country’s hi-tech industry – since 1990, and he believes that “India’s Silicon Valley” is better suited than major cities up north for his radical ideas.
“The museum will have a bigger impact in a place where there are not fixed ideas of doing things,” he says.
It isn’t just the first new Indian private art museum to open in a decade. It is also the first major private art museum in South India, the huge area in the country’s south that contains around 20 per cent of its area and population.
In August 2019, the museum named former journalist and experienced curator Kamini Sawhney as its first director. Its physical opening has been delayed for two years by Covid-19.
The museum will have four large galleries, a 130-seat auditorium, a large public library with materials on Indian art and culture, a conservation laboratory and a cafe and rooftop restaurant.
"As a country, what India spends on art and heritage is only 10 per cent more than the budget of the New York Metropolitan Museum."
- Abhishek Poddar, museum founder
Its digital presence has been building up since 2020. Apart from an extensive online catalogue and curated online exhibitions, one of the museum’s most ambitious projects was the April 2022 launch of a free online encyclopaedia of South Asian art.
Read More at https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3186864/museum-art-and-photography-bangalore-india-opening-soon-will