Foundations and trusts

The foundation describes the Alkazi Collection of Photography as a private archive of more than one lakh photographs of India and nearby regions, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An earlier press account put it at more than 95,000. Holdings include a John Murray albumen print of the Taj Mahal and waxed-paper negatives by Murray and Alexander Greenlaw.

A second archive, the Alkazi Theatre Archives, covers Indian theatre after Independence.

The foundation works through exhibitions with national, state-run and private museums across India, and through books: among them Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (2010) and Lucknow: Au Miroir du Temps (2011). It also gives grants for photobooks and theatre photography.

Its reading rooms in Greater Kailash II open on weekdays, by appointment. For anyone holding old Indian photographs, it is the obvious collection to compare against.

Asia Art Archive was founded in Hong Kong in 2000. Its Indian trust followed in 2013, and its research collection can be consulted in New Delhi.

The value is in the papers. AAA has digitised the personal archives of the critic Geeta Kapur and the artist Vivan Sundaram, and of the sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, together with her mother Leela’s, in collaboration with the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation. Documents from Nilima Sheikh’s archive became the 2018 exhibition Lines of Flight. Since 2011 it has compiled the Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of South Asia, annotated and in several languages.

Much of it is online. Some material, such as correspondence, clippings and unpublished writing, can be read only on site in Hong Kong, New Delhi or New York.

For anyone tracing where a work was shown, written about or argued over, this is a sound first stop.

FICA’s best-known prize was the Emerging Artist Award, given to one artist a year, with a twelve-week international residency and a place in FICA Homepage, the annual show of its grantees at Vadehra Art Gallery. In 2022 it became EAA+, run with the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation: a cohort of ten Indian artists under 35, each given a grant, a mentorship residency and a place in a group exhibition.

Other programmes include the Himalayan Fellowship for Creative Practitioners, the public-art programme Futures in Formation, and Art for Children, for schools, young learners and teachers. With the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and Shared Ecologies it runs the Agriforum, on the agrarian landscape in contemporary art. Its grants and awards have supported more than 45 people.

The Reading Room, now in Lado Sarai after moves from Defence Colony and Khirki Extension, pairs its shelves with talks, workshops and screenings.

The platform began in 2022. Its Encyclopedia of Art from South Asia now runs past 2,000 entries, written for general readers. Alongside it are courses, lectures and talks, and an editorial strand of features, interviews and dialogues.

Impart and the Museum of Art & Photography are both units of the Art & Photography Foundation. MAP, founded by the collector Abhishek Poddar, opened on Kasturba Road in Bengaluru in February 2023 and holds more than 20,000 works.

It is useful for quick background: who an artist trained with, what a term means, which museum holds what.

IFA’s five programmes are Arts Research, Arts Practice, Arts Education, Archives and Museums, and Project 560, named after the first digits of Bengaluru’s pin code.

Arts Research pays scholars and practitioners to study the histories of Indian art forms. Archives and Museums pays for new ways of opening collections to the public. Since 2018 IFA has kept its own archive of the projects it supported, open by appointment in Bengaluru.

It also backs other organisations. In 2003 it helped start Peers, the residency for recent art graduates at Khoj in Delhi.

Nicholson’s godson Cyrus Guzder and the lawyer Kaiwan Kalyaniwalla set up the foundation his will asked for. In 2008 it partnered with the CSMVS, and the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery opened there in 2011 as the museum’s wing for modern and contemporary art.

The collection runs past 800 works, bought by Nicholson between 1968 and 2001, and is strongest on the Bombay Progressive Artists and their contemporaries. The foundation’s rooms at the museum include a library, a research centre and a visible-storage archive.

In 2025 it worked with the Barjeel Art Foundation of Sharjah on Resonant Histories: India and the Arab World, a show placing Indian and Arab modernists side by side.

The first workshop, in 1997, was supported by Robert Loder of the Triangle Arts Trust. With his help, Khoj set up its studio building in Khirkee village, near Malviya Nagar, in 2002. Pooja Sood, one of the founders, is its director.

Its international residencies began in 2000. Peers, a residency for recent art graduates, began in 2003 with help from the India Foundation for the Arts. There are also associate and curatorial residencies, and community projects with the Khirkee and Hauz Rani neighbourhoods that surround the studios.

Its workshop and residency records show who passed through Delhi’s contemporary art scene early.

In 2025 it held a fundraising exhibition, at what The Art Newspaper called a perilous time for India’s non-profits.

Kiran Nadar began the museum with her own collection, which is still its core. It opened in January 2010 on the HCL campus in Noida with around 500 works; a year later it moved into DLF South Court Mall in Saket, New Delhi. The collection has since passed 10,000 works (2023) and, by Sotheby’s 2026 count, 16,000. It reaches from the 3rd century BCE to living artists, with modern, classical, folk and tribal work alongside.

A much larger building, designed by David Adjaye with S Ghosh & Associates, is planned on National Highway 8 near Indira Gandhi International Airport. Its designs were unveiled at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, billed as India’s largest cultural centre, with opening then set for 2026.

In 2011 Nadar funded India’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Mrinalini Mukherjee died in 2015. In New Delhi the foundation holds the physical archives of Leela and Mrinalini, open only to researchers with prior permission.

Parts of both archives have been digitised with Asia Art Archive in India, among them a 1956 letter from Benode Behari to Leela. Some restricted material, such as correspondence and unpublished writing, can be read only at AAA’s reading rooms in Hong Kong, New Delhi and New York.

With FICA it runs EAA+, which takes a cohort of ten young Indian artists and gives each a grant, mentorship, a residency and a place in an exhibition. The 2026 round drew more than 470 applications.

Aruna Advani is managing trustee; the artist Nilima Sheikh is among the trustees. The registered address is in Mumbai.

Museo Camera is an initiative of the India Photo Archive Foundation, a trust that works to make photographic archives known and used for study. The museum is a public-private partnership between that trust and the city.

It occupies 18,000 square feet on Shri Ganesh Mandir Marg, Sector 28, DLF Phase IV. Hours are 11 am to 7 pm; it is closed on Mondays.

At its centre is Arya’s collection of cameras and photographic equipment, the collection that began in his basement. Around it are exhibitions, workshops, courses and guided visits. The museum describes itself as the largest not-for-profit, crowd-funded centre for the photographic arts in South East Asia.

For anyone holding old prints, negatives or the camera that made them, it is a good place to learn how the thing was done.

The museum takes up the ground floor of Piramal Tower, in Peninsula Corporate Park. It also has galleries in Piramal property projects at Byculla, Kurla and Mulund, and an artist residency at Piramal Vaikunth in Thane.

Its first show, Smriti, drew about 40 works from the Piramals’ own collection of Indian modern art, which is documented in a book of the same name. Exhibitions since have included Abanindranath Tagore, S. H. Raza, K. Ramanujam, K. G. Subramanyan and Raja Ravi Varma.

It also runs art programmes for Piramal employees and for more than 40 schools.

The university counts 1,580 original paintings by Rabindranath and 554 by others, 1,018 volumes of manuscripts, 1,471 files of correspondence and 11,380 photographs. His own library is here too, inside a collection of more than 40,000 volumes.

The museum covers a permanent display and the five houses Tagore lived in, the Uttarayan complex. The archive holds the manuscripts and letters, open to bona fide scholars with the director’s approval. The library holds the books and more than 12,000 bound journals. The audio-visual unit keeps his voice recordings, photographic negatives, films and a complete set of colour transparencies of his paintings.

Kala Bhavana, the university’s art school, holds more of his paintings. Rabindra Chitravali (2011), R. Siva Kumar’s four-volume catalogue, reproduces about 1,700 paintings from the two collections, and more than 300 held elsewhere.

For anyone holding a work said to be by Tagore, this is the body of comparison that matters most.

Raza founded it in 2001, while still living in France. Ashok Vajpeyi has been managing trustee from the start. The Delhi foundation runs fellowships, awards, talks, concerts and exhibitions, and had published about 200 books in Hindi on the arts, poetry and philosophy by 2021. It also keeps an archive of Raza’s work and life.

The estate sits elsewhere. The Raza Foundation-Gorbio, at the villa in the French village of Gorbio that Raza shared with his wife, the painter Janine Mongillat, is chaired by Soufiane Bensabra. It owns the couple’s archives (photographs, letters, objects) and says it is the only body allowed to issue certificates of authenticity for Raza’s work, with archive numbers.

A catalogue raisonné is in progress. Volumes covering 1958–71, 1971–89 and 2011–16 appeared in 2016, 2022 and 2024, and the editors ask owners to submit works. The Delhi foundation sends authenticity questions there.

Two foundations share the name; check which one a certificate came from.

Sahapedia mixes scholarship with writing by non-specialists, which editors check before it goes up. The result is a large, free body of articles, videos, image galleries and interviews on Indian art, craft, performance and history.

S. Ramadorai is its president and Sudha Gopalakrishnan its executive director. It has offices in New Delhi and Kochi, and its current platform went live in 2016.

Beyond the encyclopedia it runs oral-history, library, built-heritage and mapping projects, a directory called Museums of India, and heritage-education work with the CBSE. Its India Heritage Walk Festival won a PATA Gold Award in 2018.

For a collector, it is context: where a craft comes from, who practised it, how a tradition changed.

The festival takes over Panaji for a week in late December, across visual art, theatre, music, dance, literature, craft and food. It is the largest thing the foundation does, and the reason most people know its name.

Through the year it gives grants for research in the visual and performing arts and for travel to residencies; the first annual round covered 2019–20. It also runs the three-month Serendipity Arts Residency, workshops and exhibitions.

Smriti Rajgarhia is its director. In 2025, the festival’s tenth year, France made Munjal a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite.

For the visual arts, it is a stage and a funder of research.

Vivan Sundaram (1943–2023) founded it with his sister Navina and was its managing trustee. His grandfather’s photographs ran through his own work: the installation The Sher-Gil Archive (1995) and the photomontage series Re-take of Amrita, begun in 2001, both drew on them. One count of Umrao Singh’s surviving photographs gives 1,536 vintage prints, 308 glass-plate negatives, 245 film negatives and 16 autochromes.

The foundation’s grants follow the family. The Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography covers both documentary and constructed images. The installation grant begun in 2019 was re-instituted as the Vivan Sundaram Grant for Installation Art in 2024. A research grant run with Asia Art Archive supports archival work on the histories of art, ideas and visual culture.

It also holds lectures, seminars and symposia, and runs a summer school through the SSAF Kasauli Art Project.

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–41) remains the reason most people know the name.