Daughters of India - Art and Identity

Stephen Huyler

Abbeville Press

2008

263 páginas

8h 46m

ISBN-10: 8189995014

Cultural anthropologist, art historian, and photographer Huyler has been on a three-decade mission to document the lives and work of Indian women artists. In his latest instructive and affecting book, he profiles 20 creative Indian women from various backgrounds and regions for whom art has been the key to overcoming myriad obstacles. The stories of their lives are wrenching and remarkable as women of all ages and predicaments grasp new freedom by taking charge of ancient artistic traditions, from embroidery to painting. Huyler’s rapport with his subjects is evident in the warm smiles his camera captures in gracefully composed photographs of the artists at work. Here are women making kolam, intricate devotional designs drawn each day with rice flour; an activist artist in West Bengal; and Sonabai, a long isolated, now celebrated self-taught sculptor in Chhatisgarh. Once the elaborate and soulful art these women make is seen and valued, so, too, are they. Huyler’s sensitive portraits provide evocative testimony to the persistence of creativity in even the starkest circumstances