Gurupada Chitrakar: An Appreciation of a Life Short-lived
This essay sidesteps the conventions of the "academic paper" genre somewhat to provide the reader with a more reflexive, personal account concerning the life and career of a remarkable artist named Gurupada Chitrakar, a charismatic man with great talent who lived most of his life cut short...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Univ.
2021
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| In: |
Nidān
Year: 2021, Volume: 6, Issue: 2, Pages: 69-88 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This essay sidesteps the conventions of the "academic paper" genre somewhat to provide the reader with a more reflexive, personal account concerning the life and career of a remarkable artist named Gurupada Chitrakar, a charismatic man with great talent who lived most of his life cut short in a tiny village located in East Medinipur, West Bengal called Naya (see Figure 1). Within that village, there is a neighbourhood of people known colloquially as Patuas or more recently by the more formal title Chitrakar, or picture maker.1 They are a low-caste group of people who paint narrative scrolls and sing songs about them for a living. The subject of my essay is a second-generation member of this community, and he was the first person I met when I landed up in Naya back in 2001, with the goal of researching his caste’s traditional occupation from a socioeconomic and performance perspective that would ultimately become a museum display and book. The project resulted in an exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art located in Santa Fe, New Mexico that was inaugurated in the fall of 2006 under the name Village of Painters: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal, along with an accompanying book published under the same name by the Museum of New Mexico Press that year. |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2021.2 |