A house for Indian wall art, built in Bombay.
Two founders. One printer that runs a little too hot. A thousand and forty-five prints, drawn from India's rich culture for modern Indian homes. Framed in-house, on a wall within 5 days in most of India.
"Nobody was writing about Indian art the way we wanted to read it."
That's the short version. The longer version is that you can buy a Madhubani print in this country from forty different stores, and almost every one of them will sell it to you with the words "exquisite","curated","thoughtfully crafted", and a vague nod toward a tradition the seller probably hasn't named. So we started a house that names the region, names the school, names the artist where we can, and writes about the work like a friend at dinner would. That was December 2022. We're still doing it.
Founders · RareMango · Bombay Handicrafts Pvt Ltd
Why a modern Indian wall-art house had to exist.
The buyer is Indian. The voice was mid-Atlantic.
Indian house, Indian buyers, Indian art. So why did every Indian wall-art store sound like it was translating itself for a buyer in Brooklyn? The work is from Bihar and Bengal. The buyer is from Bengaluru and Bombay. We should sound like that.
Region matters more than style.
Categories like "folk wall art" and "boho" flatten five regions into a single shelf. Mithila, Nathdwara, Lucknow, Maharashtra, Bengal, Bhopal, Tamil Nadu, these are real places with real schools and seasons. We organise the catalogue by where the work is from, not what it looks like.
A year has rhythm.
The Indian calendar is full. Each season pulls a different part of the catalogue to the front. A monsoon-Pichwai feels different in July than it does in October. So we drop in capsules, multiple a year, pinned to the calendar. The catalogue is always there. The telling moves with the year.
