A lot has happened since my last blog post back in March. One very important change, of course, has been the rampant worldwide spread of CoVid-19 and its impact on life, in general. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole – not during this blog post.
Instead, I would like to highlight this other happening in my life where an art opportunity has opened up – to capture the changing landscape of Durham using an indigenous tribal art form from India called ‘Warli‘ as part of the Downtown Durham Public Space Project. My partner in crime in this project is Ramya Kapadia, a fantastic Bharatanatyam dancer as well as an accomplished Carnatic singer. Needless to say, her attention to detail makes her a great visual artist as well. Most importantly though, she is a great collaborator and a joy to explore art with.
Once we submitted our proposal in January, it was then a waiting game. On Feb 14th, when we received the project proposal acceptance email, we were thrilled to bits! We could not believe that we were one of the 7 projects accepted out of the 30+ submissions. Soon it was time for us to meet up with the lovely folks at Downtown Durham Inc, the non-profit supporting this initiative. Project plans were discussed and possible venues were explored.
It was a fun, cold, early morning when both me and Ramya drove around in Durham to scout for that perfect wall to paint the mural on. We narrowed down and prioritized from the list given to us. Soon, we had the wall chosen and approved by the business. Just as we were about to embark on this art journey, the virus struck. Once the area and the state of North Carolina was under lockdown, we could not proceed with painting the mural nor run learning sessions for passers-by in an effort to engage the community, as originally intended.
Instead, we persevered and decided to conduct two online Warli workshops for any and all to join and learn the Warli vocabulary and the basic building blocks of this art style. We were so very glad to see a great number joined the live sessions and appreciated them. We still have folks looking up those recorded sessions and getting initiated in the art form. We learnt that in spite of the lockdown (or maybe because of it), community engagement – a key goal of our project – has definitely been met; online engagements help break geographical barriers, for sure.
Here are the links to the workshop recordings, for your convenience.
Workshop 1 recording: https://www.facebook.com/sampada.k.agarwal/videos/10219601730026959/
Workshop 2 recording: https://www.facebook.com/sampada.k.agarwal/videos/10219677807688853/
Looking at the interest raised among all those who attended/viewed the workshops, I consider it a true win for Warli, a simple, yet highly expressive art style that sneaks into people’s hearts with its guileless, matter-of-fact approach to art.
Ansimit by Sampada 