A Kalyani Kalakriti Foundation publication
The Raconteur is a weekly magazine of long-form stories about India’s student artists, with a new themed edition every month — and a catalogue where their work can be seen, and bought, while they are still studying.
Work by Archit Maurya, Avantika Tyagi, Deepak Kumar Rai, Nandini Tanwar, Nikhil Daksh, Priyanka Yadav, Sourav Gill, Utkarsh Shakya — all previously featured on @theofficialraconteur
The magazine
Monday 12 October. Read it right here — free for everyone who registers.
Edition One · New Beginnings
Issue One on 12 October, then 19 October, 26 October and 2 November complete Edition One. Every artist was chosen by a panel of four practising artists and art-school faculty, who saw the work and never the name.
Free for everyone who registers. Register once and read every issue in full, the flipbook and the archive. Students and faculty stay free, always.
Three artists still at art school, in every issue — the work, the method, and the day it changed.
One artist in the first years after graduating, when the support stops and the work has to carry on.
A member of the selection panel on what they look for, and what they wish someone had told them.
The Noticeboard
18 shows, workshops and calls for art students · 5 ending this week
See what’s coming up →The gap
A brilliant final-year show is seen by classmates, faculty and a handful of parents — and then it is wrapped in newspaper and carried home. There is no bridge between a college corridor and a collector, a curator, a commissioning brand, or a national readership.
Canvas, clay, kiln hours, camera hire, studio rent, framing, transport, the entry fee for a group show. An arts education asks a student to spend for four to six years before it permits them to earn anything at all.
Not because they stopped being artists. Because nobody built the first rung of the ladder. Every year India trains a generation of artists, and then loses a large share of them to work that has nothing to do with why they came.
“We are not waiting for these artists to graduate. The waiting is the problem.”
So far
Counted live from every submission. The panel sees the work, never the name.
Already on our wall
Every artist The Raconteur has featured so far is on our Instagram — their work, their studios and their stories. Tap the wall to meet them all.
@theofficialraconteurSee every artist we’ve featured →
What we do
The magazine. Every week we publish long-form stories about young artists — reported properly, photographed properly, written the way a good magazine writes about an artist with twenty years behind them. Because that is exactly what we are looking at. Twenty years early.
The catalogue. Work by featured artists, available to buy. The artist sets the price and is paid on every sale. What the Foundation keeps goes back into running the store and publishing the next artist.
The Long View
Practising artists and art-school faculty who choose our artists by the work alone — and get a wall of their own.
Pranjal Saini is an animator and visual artist based in Delhi, working across 2D and 3D animation, visual development, illustration and painting. His practice is rooted in storytelling and observation, often drawing from everyday life, people and social…
Tanmay Santra was born in West Bengal in 1969 and earned a B.Sc. from the University of Calcutta in 1991. He obtained his BVA from The Indian College of Arts & Draftsmanship, Kolkata (1999), followed by an MFA…
Saroj kumar Badatya is a visual artist based in Odisha, India. His artistic practice explores the connection between grass, agriculture, climate change, traditional knowledge, and folk Odia folk culture. He meticulously researches and collects regional grasses, exploring their…
Satadru Sovan Banduri is an internationally acclaimed Indian multidisciplinary artist, curator, researcher, and Fulbright Scholar in the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As the founder and director of HD…
Four doors
Our promises
These are policies, not aspirations. They are all inside the Foundation’s control.
Copyright stays with the artist, always. We take a limited licence to publish. We never take ownership, and we never ask for it.
Not to submit. Not to be featured. Not to be listed in the catalogue. If anyone ever asks a student for money in our name, we want to hear about it that day.
No face, no work, no words — until the artist has signed. Where an artist is under eighteen, a guardian signs too.
The artist sets the price and is paid on every sale. What the Foundation keeps goes back into running the store and publishing the next artist.
No sponsor sees a story before publication. No sponsor chooses an artist. Anything paid for is labelled as paid for, every single time.
At least a third of the artists we feature will come from outside the eight largest metros. We measure it across every twelve issues and publish the count, whether or not we hit it.
The Raconteur
A free weekly magazine of student artists — their stories, their work, and original art you can buy from them.
Issue One · out Monday 12 October
