The FICA Reading Room houses more than 4500 Indian and international books, journals and magazines on Art History, Contemporary Artists, Art Theory, Photography, and Architecture. The collection also includes catalogues of exhibitions, art fairs and auctions from the last twenty years. While the Reading Room contains key publications on the Western canon of art history, the focus of the collection has remained on furthering research around Indian art. The collection features publications and catalogue raisonné from exhibition spaces, academic and art journals, anthologies of critical essays, limited edition books, rare and private artist catalogues, magazines and auction catalogues, as well as a section dedicated to children's literature in the arts.
Our collection has grown over the years with the generous support of our donors who have contributed a vast array of literature on the arts. These additions have been welcomed, and have been crucial in expanding the scope of the collection.
View the Reading Room catalogue here.
Being one of the most prevalent modes of writing in the field of art, the Reading Room has a surfeit of publications within the category of the Artist Monograph, that focus on the genre and experiment with form. With critical essays, catalogue raisonné, compendiums and edited anthologies, these books offer focused insight into creative lives, careers, and output of several artists from across the global artistic canon.
These include publications on M.F. Husain, Mark Rothko, F.N. Souza, Francis Bacon, Shilpa Gupta, Sheba Chhachhi, Egon Schiele, Atul Dodiya, among others.
Relatively new to the collection, the Reading Room contains a small but growing section with a focus on noteworthy artists and conceptual frameworks around the medium. Majority of the section is made up of photobooks within the Indian context and crucial figures in Photography; but the unusual and esoteric (e.g. the out-of-print Japanese magazine ‘Nice to Meet You’) add another dimension. Alongside these, we have built upon the expanding scholarship by bringing in anthologies, overviews, collections of essays, and critical insights into questions surrounding photographic practices.
Artists to look out for in the section include Bharat SIkka, Cindy Sherman, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Homai Vyarawalla, and Yoko Ono.
Covering an assortment of general and region-specific studies, our architectural purview spans stylistic movements, individuals and innovations encompassed by anthologies, monographs, essays, encyclopedias, and illustrated guides. Our collection also hosts comprehensive histories of sculptural art and iconography with intensive surveys of traditions, practices, trends and developments.
The Reading Room collection is home to exhibition catalogues from a variety of art institutions and organisations like the Yokohama Triennale, White Chapel Gallery, London, National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, for example. As crucial documentations of transient displays, these books follow the afterlives of several exhibits and shows, highlighting important milestones and perspectives while offering concise insights and critical overviews into the artistic, and curatorial strategies of leading art establishments of the world.
The FICA Reading Room collection has an array of interdisciplinary writings on visual culture, philosophies, and art histories of the world with critical explorations that look at the intersections of art, cinema, aesthetics, performance, politics, heritage and museum studies. These range from general introductions to more stream-lined, in-depth studies of specific contexts.
Catering to the need for easily accessible glossaries, the Reading Room's collection of reference books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias are lexicons of facts and appraisals. They offer well-structured vocabularies on art history and aesthetics, design, and technicalities and terminologies.
With exhaustive archival sets of leading global and Indian art magazines, journals and readers, our collection provides access to issues from ArtForum, ArtIndia, Take on Art magazine, Marg, and Art Asia Pacific, to name a few, as well as copies of Sarai Readers and journals from Lalit Kala Akademi.
The collection has an engaging section of books looking at theories and praxis in the fields of drawing, design, and print media. These highlight past and present-day approaches to graphic design, printmaking, visual communication, and industrial design, among other themes, along with contemporary experiments with space and aesthetics.
Containing books studying the historical narratives of craftsmanship with regard to textiles, costumes, and other decorative arts, the Decorative Arts section at the FICA Reading Room deals with material understandings of form and function, with a particular focus on processes and traditions of making, especially the design and manufacturing of art.
Our collection of zines is an ever-growing one, a small look into the art of self-publishing and guerrilla production. Easy to produce, zines allow for artists, comic-makers and writers alike to experiment with image and text, along with circulation formats of smaller audiences.
FICA Reading Room has a dedicated section towards children’s literature in relation to the arts. A small collection in English and Hindi, the stories consist of imaginative tales and artfully rendered illustrations and design that speak to the child as well as the adult.
Special Donors to the Collection
This collection could not have been possible without the support of all those individuals and organisations that have donated books to the Reading Room.
We are grateful to Devi Art Foundation for sharing a collection of 600 publications with the FICA Reading Room. Other donors include Vadehra Art Gallery, The Guild, Shikha Trivedy, The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation, Raqs Media Collective, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Tasveer Arts, Tulika Books, Sahmat, Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, Amit Lodha, Tomoko Kurowaia, Yishu Journal, Art Forum, Shalini Passi, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.