The South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley is delighted to launch Vital Love: Collectors Speak Series, a new speaker series that addresses the collecting of South Asian art from the early modern period to the present and its intersections with art history and museum practices. The Series features conversations among collectors, art professionals, curators, and scholars of South Asian art. The second event in this series features a conversation between noted collector of Indian art, Dr. Gursharan S Sidhu and New Delhi-based art historian and curator Naman Ahuja.

March 3, 2021 9:00 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada) 

This event will also be live streamed on the South Asia Art Initiative Facebook page. 

Sponsors: Institute for South Asia Studies, Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies, South Asia Art Initiative, Department of History of Art, Christie’s, Department of Art Practice

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Gursharan S Sidhu holds degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Madras) and Stanford University. After a long career in academia and the technological sector (Apple Inc. and Microsoft), he now focuses on his passion for the arts of India. He and his wife collect traditional and vernacular paintings from India and art from Mexico. Dr. Sidhu was formerly Co-Chairman of the Board of the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, and is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Art & Photography (a new cultural institution scheduled to open in Bangalore, in 2020), the Seattle Art Museum, as well as the Acquisitions Committee of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Naman P. Ahuja is an art historian and curator based in New Delhi. He is Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where his research and graduate teaching focus on Indian iconography and sculpture, temple architecture and Sultanate-period painting. His studies on privately owned objects—terracottas, ivories and small finds—have drawn attention to a wide range of ritual cultures and transcultural exchanges at an everyday, quotidian level. He has curated several exhibitions, most notably The Body in Indian Art and Thought, and published books, including The Making of the Modern Indian Artist Craftsman: Devi Prasad. Professor Ahuja received his Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London in 2001.