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HISTORY
ArtWallah was founded as an arts festival in 1999 by The
South Asian Artists' Collective and The
Indo-American Cultural Center in a partnership to build
a voice and a presence for the South Asian artistic community.
The initial festival was produced by a founding team consisting
of Shilpa Agarwal, Sujata Bhatt, James Brennan, Andaleeb Firdosy,
Ravi Kapoor, Keshni Keshyap, Meena Nanji, Meera Simhan, and
Sarita Vasa. The first ArtWallah Festival showcased over 30
artists and reached hundreds of audience members. Since then,
it has grown to serve audiences of more than 3,000, featuring
dozens of artists, including dancers, filmmakers, writers,
musicians, theatrical and spoken word performers and visual
artists. The
ArtWallah Festival grew out of the desire of South Asian
artists, academics, and activists to create a progressive
South Asian arts festival, inspired in part by Toronto's
Desh Pardesh, to serve as a platform for personal, political,
and cultural expression. The long road to the first ArtWallah
festival, led by a founding team of dedicated organizers,
began with intense discussions on the concepts of South
Asian, arts, and diaspora, as well as a sharing of artistic
works. During these many gatherings, ArtWallah's first Steering
Committee hammered out a vision for the festival - an artistic
forum that would showcase our searches for belonging, the
shifting of identities, and the breaking and remaking of
traditions forged by our ancestors' migrations or our own.
In short, ArtWallah would be a festival that brought us
back together. The
first ArtWallah Festival was held in May 2000 in a small warehouse
in the downtown Los Angeles arts district with thirty, mostly-local
artists, their works grappling with the urgencies of cultural
displacement and the formal aesthetic demands of making art.
With each successive year came new challenges and successes.
ArtWallah began to attract artists from throughout North America
and the U.K. and became a forum for both emerging and established
artists, a unique coming together that retained the festival's
on-going commitment to its own artistic roots.
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