My organisation, Saturday Art Class collaborated with Sarmaya Arts Foundation to design three different lesson plans based on art practices traditional to Indian arts and culture context.

The Sarmaya Arts Foundation is a digital museum with an archive in Mumbai, which houses a rich collection of coins, etchings, engravings, maps, photography, rare books, folk and tribal and modern and contemporary art. Their goal is to encourage young people to be excited about art, history and heritage,and to make the collections as accessible as possible to like minded enthusiasts. Apart from an active engagement on social media and on the Sarmaya website, their outreach consists of exhibitions, art education programs, pop ups, talks and travel.

“Tholu Bommalata,” is a style of shadow puppetry originated from Andhra Pradesh, India. It is a traditional folk art where puppets are crafted and performances through them usually revolve around stories from around the villages and mythology. 

At Saturday Art Class, we used puppetry as a way to incorporate gender sensitivity amongst the children such that boys were given a female puppet stencil while girls were given male puppet stencil. They had to colour and design their own puppets and ultimately perform a skit for the classroom, keeping the gender of their puppets in mind. 

We filmed the process and you could watch it in the link provided here!

Since the topics touched, through our collaboration were sensitive topics to teach children, we held multiple training sessions for our teachers to ensure high quality being delivered in the classroom.