Painting the (Shanty) Town

Colourful patches form a pixelated pattern across the shanties in Nargis Dutt Nagar, which have been part of the Bandra Reclamation skyline in Mumbai for the past 15 years. The squares and rectangles painted in distinctive pista green, Rani pink, Krishna blue, lemon yellow and white are part of an artistic collaboration between American painter and sculptor Jeff Gillette and Mumbai-based artist and designer Samir Parker over April 11-12.

- Moeena Halim

Based in California, where he teaches art to high school students, Gillette’s fascination with the slums can be traced back to his first trip to India in the 1980s. His most popular collection of paintings, titled Dismayland, with its post-apocalyptic slum scape peppered with Disney characters, is said to have inspired Banksy’s Dismaland. Parker, who teaches design to undergraduate and postgraduate students, also finds inspiration in Mumbai’s shanties. One of his biggest projects has been the 2015 Roof/ Tarp/City project that involved the use of colourful tarpaulins to form a pattern on the roofs of chawls across Bandra.