Madame Bao

10/09/2026

21/08/2026

Gracias shukriya / शुक्रिया• .apara In the 1770s, some of India’s finest miniature painters were hired to paint birds.
Not gods. Not kings. Birds - labelled, measured, one specimen per page.
It looked like patronage. It was also the quiet beginning of a much larger loss: the moment Indian painters were conscripted into a foreign way of seeing, and the moment our own visual tradition began to forget itself.
This is the story of how a way of knowing through images got reclassified as “craft” - and how we learned to sign our names and forget our lineage.
Full essay on The Untrained Eye. Link in bio.

Company painting, colonial art history, East India Company art, Indian miniature tradition, Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Lady Impey, linear perspective colonialism, Indian parampara, shilpin tradition, guru shishya, colonial art schools India, fine art craft divide, Great Exhibition 1851, Indian visual culture, decolonising art history, Mughal painting, Vishwakarma, artisan guilds India, Sreni, SH Raza bindu, Indian art authorship, visual epistemology, South Asian art theory, Look Again, The Untrained Eye, Indian art tradition, colonial knowledge project, natural history illustration India, Indian craft history, why Indian art is called craft

06/06/2026

Last and first
Pacha Sitges 2026
Thank you and happy birthday Jacobs

04/06/2026

🖤💚🤍
22/11/1969 - 04/05/2026

29/05/2026

29/05/2026

And that’s how, using a woman’s savings during the lockdown, a w**e bar on Carrer de la Bassa Rodona, 6, was rebuilt and eventually became Madame Bao

05/04/2026

Our featured album of the week is McCoy’s ‘Nights of Ballads & Blues,’ which was recorded in 1963 at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey.