Pallavi Sharma, former committee member of Kala Ghoda Arts Festival |
15-yr-old's online art classes blossomed into an initiative for donating art kits to underprivileged children, using volunteer teachers to help students in 10 BMC schools explore their creativity.
Gauri Gupta was 12 years old when she decided to start an online art camp during the summer of 2020. The nationwide lockdown due to Covid-19 had closed schools and summer camps, and she thought an online art camp would be a good way to keep children occupied. As a few dozen children from underprivileged communities joined the online sessions, Gauri’s initiative slowly grew into a medium for children to explore their creativity despite difficult circumstances.
When children from municipal schools said they didn’t have colours or paper, Gauri and her family, joined by some friends, began to send them art kits. Eventually, as classes resumed in schools, so did the programme, now called Art Ki Pathshala, a school for art.
Now 15, Gauri said the programme is a means to nurture creative voices and also build character. “My parents helped me hone my creative process by trusting my instincts and nurturing my capacity. Through this project, I am seeing how art not only provides a coping mechanism around trauma but also instils confidence and resilience,” she said.
Volunteers, students from art colleges in the city, and some from the charitable group Redboys Foundation, now run Art Ki Pathshala classes in 10 schools of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).
From friends and family members engaging 50 children online initially, the initiative has grown tremendously. Art Ki Pathshala has provided art kits and training to nearly 2,000 students from Classes VI to VIII. Students explore concepts around shapes, colours and thematics, and they experiment with self-expression.
Granddaughter of a painter, Gauri took to painting as a child. Her mother Arpita, an educator herself, recounted how she started painting with Gauri while preparing her for a sibling. “She was an only child at that time and the transition would have been difficult for her. So, painting became an activity that we shared and bonded over,” Arpita said.
Gauri’s paintings created over several years were recently sold through an exhibition to raise funds for the art kits to be distributed through Art Ki Pathshala. “We did a garage sale of her art and prints of her photographs to arrange money for the art kits; it was her idea,” Arpita said.
Gauri wants to expand the programme across the city and include more and more children and volunteers. Cheered on by her friends in school and at various art colleges who have formed an online community, she also wants to organise an exhibition for all her students. “It is empowering to see your work exhibited. I want all these children from the under-resourced communities to experience the agency and become agents of their own upliftment,” she said.
