By Vinay Seth
Are you aware that there exists an art gallery exclusively dedicated to children in the southern part of the country, Hyderabad? Yes, The Children’s Fine Arts Gallery is located right next to the Daira Center for Arts & Culture in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad. They organise an annual Children’s Arts Festival, and this year’s edition is in full bloom at the moment. Recently, I was fortunate enough to get the good opportunity to talk to one of its founders, Ms. Atika Amjad, and got to learn very interesting aspects about the space.
The beginnings — Two journalists start an art gallery in Hyderabad, but with little success
The story begins with two journalist-sisters — Atika Amjad and Atiya Amjad — who decided to open an art gallery in Hyderabad. They launched the gallery — Daira Center for Arts & Culture — in 2001. Although not from a Fine Art background, they had felt interested in the contemporary art space and joined the art market with high hopes. However, to their surprise, they soon learnt that the art scene in Hyderabad was lacking in fervour. While they had set their hopes high while combining an interest with a business opportunity, they learned to their dismay that there was hardly any art market in existence in Hyderabad at the time. Atika told me that prior to Daira, there were only 2 prominent art galleries in the town.
The iron-willed sisters did not give up on their endeavour though, and instead tried to figure out the underlying reasons behind the lacklustre art scene in their town. With time and experience, they realised that contemporary art was confined to a very small group of artists and connoisseurs, and not very open to the public at large. Atika commented, “Even promotional art activities such as seminars were restricted to isolated areas, with the same crowds attending. At the same time, the general public had misconceptions about art,” as the general public was not highly aware about the contemporary art scene or about art history. Atika adds that Hyderabadis at the time did not seem to be aware of artists at all, “except MF Husain, and Raja Ravi Varma.
Since both the sisters were from an academic background and not an entrepreneurial one, they struggled to even figure out how to make money in this field.
A lucky foray into art education
In the late 2000s, the sisters met some American students on an exchange programme to Hyderabad. They were from the IDEX Fellowship, an initiative by Greymatters Capital in the US. As part of their programme, they were teaching kids in ‘budget schools’. In a bid to explore the city, they went on a hunt to visit art galleries in the city, and were surprised to learn that there were hardly any. They finally came to the Amjad sisters’ gallery space, whereupon the sisters learned of their endeavour. The Amjads decided to help and design the art curriculum for the schools they were volunteering for. With the few learnings gained from getting involved in the art world, the Amjad sisters stepped in and created an art curriculum. Atika told me that the schools were ‘glorified tuition classes’ where the students didn’t even have benches, and would sit in the school till 3 pm, holding their bags on their laps. The sisters created art exercises for these school kids, with very minimal art materials. They managed to get on board Thota Laxminarayana — a budding artist at the time, now an established artist with his own studio. This programme lasted for two years. Around the same time, a group of students from ISB (the Indian School of Business) approached the Amjads for a pro bono project as part of their educational assignment. The ISB students made a business proposal for them, pertaining to children’s art education.
The IDEX experience in particular made Atika decide to create an online art education curriculum. People around her, including her sister Atiya, said that this cannot happen, but Atika held her ground. Hence, she prepared art modules in soft copies, and got them signed by schools helped Atiya and Atika to create education modules for online art courses. This turned out to be such a success that Teach for India — a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating educational inequality in India — adopted their curriculum. For the first year of this collaboration, the curriculum was taught across the Hyderabad schools under Teach for India, and for the next year, it was adopted for the entire country. After that though, it was again limited to Hyderabad, due to the various state boards’ clashes in timetable and curriculum.
A progressive solution found — Starting them young!
While the inside-outside dynamics of the art crowd could not be changed immediately, the Amjad sisters innovatively came up with a solution to develop an art audience in Hyderabad. “Why is art taken seriously in the West?” Atika wondered. She felt that there was a need to seriously educate younger kids about art, starting from their Primary school years. “It is important for young kids to visit art galleries, so that they understand art better,” become artists and art audiences “and maybe even buy art in the future.”
Children’s Fine Art Gallery — Inaugurated in 2010, with the support of eminent artists
The experience in the art world and subsequently in art teaching for young kids, gave birth to an ingenuous idea — an art gallery dedicated solely to kids! The Children’s Fine Arts Gallery wasn’t a highly deliberately planned initiative, but rather the culmination of the organic journey of the sisters’ foray into art, and subsequently into children’s art.
While Daira was started in 2001, Children’s Fine Art Gallery commenced in 2010. It was a success right from the get-go, when the eminent classical dancer Mallika Sarabhai, in town at the time, inaugurated the gallery, alongside eminent artist Thota Vaikuntam. MF Husain also visited it once. “We were lucky that MF Husain sir came to our gallery and requested Atiya to curate shows in his gallery, Cinema Ghar in Hyderabad then!” Atika informed me.
Artists’ encouragement
While the inter-school art competition has been a successful concept across the country and the Bal Bhavan model has been in existence for decades, what this gallery does different is that it not only hosts regular exhibitions of children’s artworks, but also give them an opportunity to look, learn and create inspired artworks of master and contemporary artists. This has been a deliberate attempt so that the school students learn about senior artists\’ works by exposing them to artistic sensibilities. The sisters hope that this will help create a generation of artists as well as art enthusiasts, thus enabling the flourishing of the art ecosystem in Hyderabad.
Expanding the Hyderabad Art scene with adults and children together
The Daira compound having two wings in its compound — one for regular artists and one for children, is an interesting one, with both these spaces interacting with each other in different ways.
As per Atika, the goal of the Children’s Fine Art Gallery is multifarious. It aims to not only showcase the artworks of children, but also to educate young kids. At the same time, it wishes to invite adults who think that art is an elitist endeavour, into the world of art. Atika aims to “seek the attention of new people and invite them to the galleries.”
Innovative curatorial approaches for children’s art
Over the years, the Amjad sisters have come with unique programmes to engage with children’s art. For one such exploration, a group of children made a newsletter where the participating children narrated the story of a famous artist, and that of an art teacher who they interviewed and created a comic format newsletter.
For an edition of Hyderabad Literary Fest, the sisters dressed children as characters from the acclaimed Telangana-based artist T. Vaikuntam’s paintings, brought them out to the stage at the end of the event, and wowed the audience by having the children pose in front of a frame.
For a workshop with a government girls’ boarding school, they used the Hyderabadi artist Kappari Kishan’s paintings of women with braids as a reference point, and used them to teach braiding of hair to the young girl students.
During the 2020 pandemic-induced lockdown, the sisters created a daily prompt-based children’s art competition, which saw the participation of children from all over the country. Playing with the word ‘Corona’, they wittingly called this programme ‘Art Karo Na’ (‘Please do art’ in Hindi). The little participants were given one topic each day, inspired by a different artist. This lasted for a period of 35 days, culminating with the ending of that particular lockdown. With the lockdown lifted, the Amjads came up with a unique idea for the children to exhibit their results — they curated a ‘Balcony Show’, where the children showcased their works on their balconies. Atika amusingly recalled an incident during this time where a child got upset with their parents, since their house did not have a balcony at all. That child was allowed to display the works in their cupboard though.
Then there’s an interesting exhibition of paintings of tigers that the sisters managed to make interesting for child visitors once. “I have a tiger series painted realistically by artist Wali. He is no more, but his works are with us. We don’t know how to give them back to the family. So we are using them for educational purposes. An interesting show was created of these tiger series. We made are gallery pitch dark and displayed these works. There was no light at all. Then children entered the room with torches. We played the jungle music, the moment they were coming inside. And then these kids would go around throwing the torchlight, and read interesting questions written below. For example, we asked them — what time do you think is happening in this painting? Which forest do you think these tigers are in? These kind of interesting questions.”
But one aspect of the Children’s Fine Art Gallery and the Children’s Festival that seemed peculiar to me, was that unlike regular artworks, the children’s artworks aren’t sold for money. This has been a deliberate attempt by the Amjads to not commercialise art at such a young age. They have devised other, barter-based modes of exchange for the paintings though. In one instance the sisters were approached by an international school which had adopted a government school. They were asked to curate a show for this school. The international school’s idea was to give the government school kids some gifts in exchange of the artworks that would be produced, perhaps even buy the children’s works. The Amjads, in response, modified their idea and did a project titled ‘Hazaaron Khwaaishen Aisi’. Under this, they asked the children of the government school to make an artwork and in place of a price tag, have them write down a note about what they would like to have in exchange of their work.The results were surprising — many of them asked for very basic needs, such as sanitary pads, lunchboxes and shoes. The parents of the international school came to the final show, and felt very emotional when they saw these notes. Atika says that this made them donate even more money to these kids, than would have been possible had standard price tags been attached to their works.
Children’s Fine Art Festival — A treat for children in Hyderabad and beyond, with a Photo Booth this time
Keeping with their objectives, the Amjad sisters have been organising an annual Children’s Arts Festival, for which they hire a big space. They have hired spaces like Bal Bhavan in the past, and the 2022 edition is in full swing at the Telangana Minorities Residential Institutional Society (School), Bandlaguda, Hyderabad. The festival is currently hosting around 6,000 participants over a period of 3 days, with 35-40 activities scheduled.
“This time, (we’ve) called for a Meet-and-Greet programme, with senior artists from the city to come and interact with the kids, talk to them about their lives, their works, give a little demo to them,” Atika informed me.
One of their many interesting activities for this edition has been designed as an inter-school competition, where children are asked to create a photo booth inspired by an art masterpiece, and click a photo using it, thus introducing an element of interactivity into the experience.
The Children\’s Art Fest 2022 has been scheduled for 25th-27th August 2022, at the Telangana Minorities Residential Institutional Society (School), Bandlaguda, Hyderabad.
