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INDIAN AMERICAN ARTISTS

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TARA SABHAARWAL, VISIONS, 1992

the Chairperson of the 700-member New York National Association of Women Artists, and taken a show of 70 artists to India. India is always in her thoughts but America has now changed from a frightening new land to something akin to home. She says: "I go back for inspiration but I think this is my home now. I have a new Indian-American identity."

Vijay Kumar, an artist who has lived in New York for over 20 years, was born in Lahore, grew up in Lucknow and received his art education in Delhi. He was artist in residence in Penn State University and met his future wife in his class. Kumar teaches printmaking at the Manhattan Graphics Center, which he founded along with other artists in the 1970's. Although he has spent two decades in this country, it took an event in India for him to question his identity through art. During his last visit to India, just before the Ayodhya incident, he was attacked and beaten on a lonely road by a group of fanatics who wanted to know why he spoke in English and why he was with a white woman. The result was a series of prints titled 'Betrayal', a commentary on the communalism that had gripped India. The collection of 18 prints was recently bought by The New York Public Library. In April, Purchase University is holding his one-man exhibition and lecture. Due to his personal experiences, Kumar's art has become increasingly politicized.

There are other artists who do not feel the necessity to put their search for identity on canvas. Natwar Bhavsar has perhaps lived in New York city the longest and is one of the most prominent Indian artists. He came to America in 1962 to obtain an M.F.A from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, and received the John D. Rockefeller III Fund Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Over the last 30 years he has had solo group shows and his works of art are in several collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

From the folklore of his native Gujarat, from the large vats of color in his uncle's textile mill, from the multicolored hues of holi and rangoli, Bhavsar formed a lifelong passion for the magic of color. The Indian colors, the method of dispersing them on canvas in rangoli-fashion still find their way onto his huge canvases. He believes that the further you are from your own culture, the more analytically you observe what you left behind. He says, "You try to search for the meaning with other people. That's a natural course. That's how music comes out of someone's mouth, dance comes out of someone's feet, and that's how color comes out of someone's palm. Art is always expressed as a need to enhance something socially; the society that you are in becomes part and parcel of you."

Bhavsar believes that the questioning, the searching is part of being an artist: "I really feel that the churning inside is a natural force of creating something. It's like when you make butter by churning milk. Art has that necessity, and some artists feel a sociological need to translate things in a more narrative form. Other artists express them in a very essential way. I have chosen to express my joys

LITTLE INDIA MARCH 1994 33