Top Indian female graffiti artists breaking the shackles
In a male-dominated art field, below is a list of women breaking barriers and painting colours on India’s streets.
Outside the four walls of art galleries, graffiti and streets art are changing the scenario of the art world with their striking colours and shapes. With their quirky and unique designs and sometimes highlighting important messages, female graffiti and street artists in India are leaving their mark on an art field dominated by males. Below we give you the list of those Indian street artists.
Kajal Singh
Kajal Singh, also known at Dizy, is a 25-year-old graffiti artist, beauty and fitness vlogger, painter and a hip-hop dancer. Her mother’s encouragement to take up art and her love for hip-hop combined to inspire her to take up graffiti. Using conventional graffiti with big blocky letters in bright colours, she seeks permission before writing on spaces like railway bridges, among others. Witness her work on the streets of Kolkata, Varanasi, Delhi, Berlin and Germany.
Jheel Goradia
A Mumbai-based street artist, Jheel Goradia, combines digital media with street art to create hard-hitting emotive work for her millennial target audience. She creates her characters and work digitally, prints and pastes them on the walls of Mumbai’s suburbs. She started the #BreakingtheSilence project during her final year at college, which focuses on inspiring Indian women to speak up about injustices and to highlight the depiction of women as secondary characters in Bollywood.
Anpu Varkey
Have you been noticing the cat-themed murals on the streets of Chennai, Delhi, Pune and Rishikesh? The credit goes to Anpu Varkey, a Bengaluru native street artist. First introduced to street art in Germany, Anpu is trained as a painter and also participates and co-organizes street art festivals. She collaborated with a German graffiti artist to create one the most significant street artworks in India – the huge Mahatma Gandhi mural at the Delhi Police headquarters tower.
Jas Charanjiva
Jas Charanjiva, born in the UK and brought up in California and Toronto, is one of the most celebrated Indian street artists. A visit to a graffiti-inspired exhibit in New York led to her first step in the field, and her work came into public’s view at a festival called Art Conspiracy in Mumbai. Her most popular design is ‘The Pink Lady’ or ‘Don’t Mess With Me’. Currently, she, along with her husband, runs a platform called Kulture Shop for Indian graphic artists around the world.
Next time you spot a mural on the walls in India, stop and admire the hard work of the artists.
