The Fowler Museum on the UCLA campus is an exhibition space for material of ethnological interest. The exhibitions here are not, tendentially or primarily, to be read in terms of their relationship to contemporary art on the Western market. Such exhibitions can be refreshing, however, and can remind artists and viewers alike as to how life and art intersect in cultural situations alternative to Chelsea and Chinatown. 

Case in point: "Please Listen, People": Addressing HIV/AIDS in Bengali Scroll Paintings. In 2001, Nandita Palchoudhuri, a folk arts curator concerned that scroll painting was dying out, invited artists who were then earning a living making furniture and cutting gems to return to their craft and train to tell the facts of the AIDS crisis through performance and scrollpainting. After some initial inaccuracies, the men and women making scrolls embraced the project. Said Monimala Chitrakar, "City people are educated and have access to all kinds of communications, such as movies in English or Hindi. But the scroll has a different sort of quality, a very good inherent quality through which information can be understood and accepted. People like me only understand Bengali. When I sing and show the scroll, people are getting information in their own language and in a way that they understand."

Monimala's voice carries throughout the space of the show, actually: a video screen shows her singing and turning the scrolls (which are hung flanking the screen on which she's shown.) These paintings on paper vary widely in their depictions and styles. Many are quite literal in terms of what they picture: needles, dead people, lovers. All make idiosyncratic use of the bands separating panels of illustration on each scroll: some pictures are surrounded by repeated motifs of fish or flowers, while other pictures are embraced by wide-eyed, spiky-haired men. Decisions by each artist in terms of how to depict space are diverse and challenging: the story may be told vertically, but stories can bleed out horizontally and indeed diagonally. The scale of the people depicted varies: the pictures are mostly populated by adult figures of the same size, but are occasionally peppered with smaller people, probably children, or larger, perhaps gods. Palettes too are exciting and varied: one artist works in a delicate infusion of pale roses, greens and yellows, while another uses striking black outlines with colors like safety orange and fluorescent yellow.

(Image: Swarna Chitrakar, HIV/AIDS, Scroll, paint on paper, Courtesy the artist and the Fowler Museum)