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
This week’s issue
Register free to read every story in full and flip through the whole issue.
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.
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 catalogue
Every work comes from an artist featured in The Raconteur. The artists set the prices and are paid on every sale.
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…
The panel sees the work, never the name. No fee to apply, ever. The artist keeps every right to their work. Read our six promises →
The Noticeboard
19 shows, workshops and calls for art students · 5 ending this week
See what’s coming up →Four doors
The Raconteur
A free weekly magazine of student artists — their stories, their work, and original art you can buy from them.
A new issue every Monday
