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Lot Essay
The Germination Project: Building the Future of Philadelphia
Collectors, philanthropists and cultural ambassadors, Pamela and Ajay Raju are model citizens. In the spirit of civic engagement, the Rajus established the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation to support those organizations and initiatives with the most impact, ingenuity and long-range vision for the advancement and development of Philadelphia.
Among the Raju Foundation’s principal enterprises is the Germination Project, a non-profit, catalytic incubator for Philadelphia’s next generation of civic leaders, drawn from the best and brightest of Philadelphia’s high school students.
The Germination Project’s mission is to create a self-sustaining ecosystem of leadership to transform Philadelphia into a global force in policy, commerce and culture. Students are selected to participate in a leadership training program developed in collaboration with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. After graduating from college, students who participate in the program agree to return to Philadelphia to live and work. Through institutional partnerships with universities, healthcare organizations and technology firms, the Germination Project empowers its fellows both with the skills to build careers in a changing economic landscape, and with a sense of civic duty to deploy those skills for the benefit of Philadelphia’s underserved communities.
A hallmark initiative of the Germination Project is the IntXchange, a transnational art-advocacy network dedicated to forging a new arts and culture exchange between the Eastern World and the West. Through the deployment of institutional resources like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Opera Philadelphia, IntXchange seeks to fortify a relationship of reciprocal awareness, support and binary collaboration between two seemingly disparate arts communities. For Germination Project Fellows, the IntXchange offers an experiential arts education led by experts from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a diverse consortium of artists from the U.S. and India alike. The pedagogical goal of the IntXchange is to create, within the ranks of Germination Project’s student fellow alumni, a leadership class of cultural ambassadors equipped to enrich and strengthen Philadelphia’s global relationships.
Atul Dodiya was the featured artist from India in the inaugural edition of the IntXchange’s biennial program in 2013. The program soon caught the imagination of other leading artists from South Asia. Jitish Kallat was invited after Dodiya and the featured artist for 2016 is Ranjani Shettar. In support of the Germination Project, leading contemporary South Asian artists and patrons in the field, including A. Balasubramaniam (lot 695), Atul Dodiya (lot 697), Jitish Kallat (lot 700), Reena Kallat (lot 699), Rashid Rana (lot 700B), and Ranjani Shettar (lot 700D), came together and donated works to the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation. DAG Modern has generously donated several works toward the cause. It is the collective belief that what a couple has single-handedly achieved can only get stronger with the support of some of the biggest names in the South Asian art world to ensure the future of the Germination Project, to build better citizens and create a bridge between the East and West through art.
The entire proceed raised from the sale of lots 695-700D will benefit the Germination Project.
Testing the boundaries of materiality and perception for more than ten years, Alwar Balasubramaniam’s body of work has established him as an important artistic and intellectual force on the global stage. The artist uses a diverse range of materials including silicone, iron, bronze, stone and fiberglass in his work to tackle and even contravene fundamental questions about the limits of human observation. His sculptural transcriptions of negative spaces and natural processes, forces and phenomena like breath, shadows and gravity dismantle customary conceptions of sculpture and form by realizing the immaterial and intangible.
“For over a decade now Balasubramaniam has kept pushing our limits of perception, understanding of material and experience of space. The phenomenons created by him reveal the omnipresent but invisible, the strong yet unnoticed, the essential yet overlooked. An encounter with his works discloses not just the world surrounding us but also the world within us. Bala allows us to transgress the boundaries between elements, as they connect and converge into one another, questioning the submissiveness of our consciousness to them and in process their foundation.” (D. Talwar, ‘The Art of Nothingness’, (IN)Between, Delhi, 2010, unpaginated)
Collectors, philanthropists and cultural ambassadors, Pamela and Ajay Raju are model citizens. In the spirit of civic engagement, the Rajus established the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation to support those organizations and initiatives with the most impact, ingenuity and long-range vision for the advancement and development of Philadelphia.
Among the Raju Foundation’s principal enterprises is the Germination Project, a non-profit, catalytic incubator for Philadelphia’s next generation of civic leaders, drawn from the best and brightest of Philadelphia’s high school students.
The Germination Project’s mission is to create a self-sustaining ecosystem of leadership to transform Philadelphia into a global force in policy, commerce and culture. Students are selected to participate in a leadership training program developed in collaboration with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. After graduating from college, students who participate in the program agree to return to Philadelphia to live and work. Through institutional partnerships with universities, healthcare organizations and technology firms, the Germination Project empowers its fellows both with the skills to build careers in a changing economic landscape, and with a sense of civic duty to deploy those skills for the benefit of Philadelphia’s underserved communities.
A hallmark initiative of the Germination Project is the IntXchange, a transnational art-advocacy network dedicated to forging a new arts and culture exchange between the Eastern World and the West. Through the deployment of institutional resources like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Fringe Arts, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Opera Philadelphia, IntXchange seeks to fortify a relationship of reciprocal awareness, support and binary collaboration between two seemingly disparate arts communities. For Germination Project Fellows, the IntXchange offers an experiential arts education led by experts from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a diverse consortium of artists from the U.S. and India alike. The pedagogical goal of the IntXchange is to create, within the ranks of Germination Project’s student fellow alumni, a leadership class of cultural ambassadors equipped to enrich and strengthen Philadelphia’s global relationships.
Atul Dodiya was the featured artist from India in the inaugural edition of the IntXchange’s biennial program in 2013. The program soon caught the imagination of other leading artists from South Asia. Jitish Kallat was invited after Dodiya and the featured artist for 2016 is Ranjani Shettar. In support of the Germination Project, leading contemporary South Asian artists and patrons in the field, including A. Balasubramaniam (lot 695), Atul Dodiya (lot 697), Jitish Kallat (lot 700), Reena Kallat (lot 699), Rashid Rana (lot 700B), and Ranjani Shettar (lot 700D), came together and donated works to the Pamela and Ajay Raju Foundation. DAG Modern has generously donated several works toward the cause. It is the collective belief that what a couple has single-handedly achieved can only get stronger with the support of some of the biggest names in the South Asian art world to ensure the future of the Germination Project, to build better citizens and create a bridge between the East and West through art.
The entire proceed raised from the sale of lots 695-700D will benefit the Germination Project.
Testing the boundaries of materiality and perception for more than ten years, Alwar Balasubramaniam’s body of work has established him as an important artistic and intellectual force on the global stage. The artist uses a diverse range of materials including silicone, iron, bronze, stone and fiberglass in his work to tackle and even contravene fundamental questions about the limits of human observation. His sculptural transcriptions of negative spaces and natural processes, forces and phenomena like breath, shadows and gravity dismantle customary conceptions of sculpture and form by realizing the immaterial and intangible.
“For over a decade now Balasubramaniam has kept pushing our limits of perception, understanding of material and experience of space. The phenomenons created by him reveal the omnipresent but invisible, the strong yet unnoticed, the essential yet overlooked. An encounter with his works discloses not just the world surrounding us but also the world within us. Bala allows us to transgress the boundaries between elements, as they connect and converge into one another, questioning the submissiveness of our consciousness to them and in process their foundation.” (D. Talwar, ‘The Art of Nothingness’, (IN)Between, Delhi, 2010, unpaginated)