SHURUA(R)T

India currently has around 50,000 students pursuing visual arts education at graduate and aster's level. However, most of these students, especially female students don't pursue any employment opportunities. Our solution includes online resources to teach them to become artist entrepreneurs through online courses, workshops and an e-commerce website to sell their artworks. Students can learn the skills to sustain as professional artists and sell their artworks to earn income

Livelihood opportunities for professional artists, especially, female artists living in Tier 2/3 cities in India are fewer. Many don't know how to effectively market or sell their artworks. Problem becomes acute for those who come from economically disadvantaged background, thus lacking family guidance. There are currently 50,000 students taking admission into different visual arts courses in India every year.

1. An online learning material for visual arts students that teaches them about various aspects of promoting/selling their artworks

2. Workshops with students to teach about preparing for selling their artworks through online and offline exhibitions

3. A e-commerce website to sell the paintings of visual arts students

4. Off line exhibitions of artworks by students

Solution intends to help the students of visual arts living in Tier 2/3 cities in India. At scale, it can offer livelihood opportunities to all artisans involved in selling handicrafts, folk arts, etc.

Starting with the visual arts students studying at Banaras Hindu University, located in Varanasi, India, we have been doing regular workshops with the students to understand the gaps. Over the past 5 years we have also done few exhibitions withe students to understand the art  market e..g price, buyers, channels, etc.

Visual arts students living in Tier 2/3 cities in India struggle to sustain their professional career. Many, especially female and those from economically disadvantages families, end up giving their career. At primary level, it leads to loss of employment opportunities for them. Secondarily, it also leads to loss of many art forms as their practitioners gradually decrease, leading to loss of culture.

Currently, the business aspect of visual arts, e.g. paintings, murals, etc are not part of the art education course anywhere. While there are galleries, organizations that promote/sell artworks of the artists, the initial years of support where students learn to become artists are missing. A financial support along with the know-how of sustaining as a professional artist can help many students continue in their profession, directly leading to increased income opportunities for them. Additionally, it can help traditional art forms to flourish by increased number of practitioners

Using online education modules that uses websites and app to share the information. An e-commerce website that enables artists to sell their paintings.

We have online courses through which people can learn about Indian folk art forms,. This has allowed an employment opportunity for a couple of visual arts students, https://www.udemy.com/user/san...

We also have a website, https://www.shuru-art.com to sell paintings done by visual arts students

Professional visual artists living in Tier 2/3 cities can use the global connectivity offered by the internet to earn livelihood by using their unique skills. This will also help in preserving and popularizing arts forms, integral to local culture.

Through our platform, we help 5+ students every year to sustain their livelihood by engaging in activities like art education, selling art works online, commissioned portraits, commercial mural works, etc.

Many artists have also learned to create a compelling online presence that has helped them to get commercial contracts for art related works.

Currently, we are working with 70 visual arts students from Banaras Hindu University and Patna University.

After our online course goes live, we expect to involve around 2000 students through our online course.

In the next year, we expect to bring our course online that teaches students about selling their art works online and have a compelling online profile to promote and sell their art works online. Though this we intend to enroll majority of students pursuing visual arts education in cities where Hindi is the primary language.

Over the next 5 years, we intend to release our online course in all the major Indian languages, thus helping artisans to learn about online selling of artworks as well.

We have been financing our needs only through loans from family & friends in the last 5 years, as we wanted to better understand our beneficiary group. Also, since we operate in Tier 2 city in an economically backward region, to stay closer to our beneficiary group, our own access to customers has been a challenge.

To play to our strengths of running a business in a city that has limited economic opportunities, we have managed to keep our operational costs low, thus allowing us to run experiments to test the market. We have added different avenues to sell paintings through partnerships with hotels. We have also launched online courses that allow us to remotely earn the money while staying on-course to our impact goals

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4 of us have been working on this problem for 3+ years. Team is a good combination of young people and experience, majority team members specializing in production of audio visual content. Team is all female, making it easier to work with female students. Team also includes a person with 10+ years of software development experience, making it easy to stay updated with the latest technologies.

We are looking to earn through our online courses on folk arts and marketing for artists