כפר האמנים... לאן? Cholamandal: An open question

This photo of Cholamandal Artists' Village is courtesy of TripAdvisor

The late sculptor S Nandagopal would insist that there was no place like Cholamandal. “Where else can you find a self-reliant artist community like ours? Which other community has built its own museum?” Aside of Ein Hod, an artists’ village in Israel founded in 1953, there are few parallels of a community as envisioned by Nandagopal’s father, KCS Paniker (1911-77), a pioneering force of the Madras Movement. It’s hard to imagine these 10 acres as sparse vegetation when Paniker established Cholamandal in May 1966. Prolific clumps of bougainvillea in bright magenta and paper-white bloom under the hot sun this first weekend of February. There is a buzz at the Cholamandal Centre for Contemporary Art, which opened in 2009 with a museum and two galleries — Laburnum and Indigo. Largely steered by Nandagopal, the museum collection has works of 55 artists associated with the Madras Movement, including important figures outside of the Village such as Alphonso Arul Doss, C Dakshinamoorthy, KM Adimoolam and RM Palaniappan.

לכתבה...

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