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New York Times: India’s Art History United in a Single Source

The history of art in India, going back 10,000 years to the Bhimbetka cave drawings, has long been told through a Western lens or written by Indian scholars in a dense, academic style that felt inaccessible to many.

But that will soon change, when the MAP Academy Encyclopedia of Indian Art arrives online on April 21. With over 2,000 initial entries, peer-reviewed by some of the world’s leading art historians and experts on South Asia, it is a project whose scope has not been tried before. Read more

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New York Times: Weaving the Threads of Applied and Contemporary Art


LONDON — Considering her tumultuous early childhood, it is little wonder that the South African artist Bonolo Kavula craves the meditative mental stillness she gets from working with textiles. Read more

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New York Times: In Opposite Styles, 2 African Artists Capture the Same Spirit

LONDON — At first glance, the works of Marcellina Akpojotor and Sungi Mlengeya seemingly have nothing in common. Ms. Akpojotor’s bright canvases are infused with color and textiles, and Ms. Mlengeya creates stripped-down black-and-white works that are stunning in their simplicity. Read more

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New York Times: Putting West African Art in a Global Spotlight

Around the same time in 2017 that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, promised that the repatriation of African artifacts from French museums would be a “top priority” for his government, Cécile Fakhoury discovered a number that truly shocked and unsettled her: About 90 percent of the sales from her gallery in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, were to international collectors.

Considering that her reason for setting up Galerie Cécile Fakhoury had been to sell West African contemporary art to regional collectors and help strengthen a local art scene, it felt to her that history was repeating itself. Read more

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New York Times: India’s Art World Has Suffered, and Thrived, in the Pandemic

LONDON — Amrita Jhaveri gently jokes that she was rescued by a Bollywood star. When the actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, a client of Ms. Jhaveri’s art gallery, approached her in the summer of 2020 to ask if she would like to use Ms. Kapoor Ahuja’s London office as something of an exhibition space, Ms. Jhaveri was intrigued.

“She said, ‘I have this space, you can use the walls as you like,’” said Ms. Jhaveri, who is based in London but who, like Ms. Kapoor Ahuja, used to travel back to India frequently (she and her sister own Jhaveri Contemporary, in Mumbai). Read more

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