Museum · Bengaluru, Karnataka
Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)
A private museum on Kasturba Road holding more than 20,000 works from the twelfth century to now. It treats photography, textiles and popular culture as seriously as painting.
See first
- The Living Traditions department: folk and Adivasi artists
- Photography, including studio portraiture
- Textiles, Craft and Design
- Popular culture: the printed and mass-made image
- The online exhibitions, which run alongside the galleries
MAP opened online first. Its digital museum launched in December 2020 with a week-long festival, and the building on Kasturba Road opened to the public on 18 February 2023. The five-floor building, by Mathew & Ghosh Architects, holds five galleries, an auditorium, a research library, a restoration lab and a sculpture garden.
The collection began with its founder, Abhishek Poddar, who gave more than 7,000 works in 2017. It now numbers more than 20,000, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, in six departments: Modern and Contemporary Art; Photography; Living Traditions; Popular Culture; Pre-Modern Art; and Textiles, Craft and Design.
The useful thing about MAP is that it does not rank these. Its first online exhibitions went to a studio photographer from Nagda, Suresh Punjabi, and to the Bhil artist Bhuri Bai. The museum published a book on the Gond-Pardhan painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, including his last letter to his wife and his mother. Go for a painting and leave having spent longer with a photograph.