How Smriti Rajgarhia Makes Serendipity Shine

Director of the Serendipity Arts Foundation and the Serendipity Arts Festival, Smriti Rajgarhia, is trained as an architect with a Masters in Design. She began her career in the arts more than two decades ago by working with a private archive in New Delhi. While creating a museum space, her interest expanded into bringing art to the public and contextualising it through education and awareness. Smriti has also curated exhibitions on subjects that reflect the history and relevance of archives.

-  Neha Kirpal

Currently, she is leading the Serendipity Arts Foundation and working on the Serendipity Arts Festival to bring her passion for art and design to the forefront by creating unique opportunities for creative individuals. With these two platforms, she endeavours to explore newer forms of representation and re-contextualize the kind of programming institutions need to engage with to widen the demographic of the audience for the arts in India. Her personal interest also lies in adapting urban spaces to presentation of the arts and reasserting the impact of art and cultural interventions for a city, state or country.

Tell us about your background.

Changing fields from architecture to working for an art collector was a big shift for me. When I walked into the archive and saw the collection for the first time, I was home. I learnt from looking at art, and it shaped who I have become. I realised that a collection had so many stories to tell. We established an archive and museum space where my training as an architect helped tremendously.

The archive became a point of departure for my own life's trajectory, where I learnt the power that art holds to narrate unwritten histories. The archive grew to become a place for pedagogy and research, where we published many titles. It also helped me understand the very conduits that could be created from art to conversations and worldviews through inquiry.

This pivotal experience encouraged me to focus on creating opportunities for creative talent and making art more accessible to the public, particularly through arts education and regional awareness initiatives. Around this time, I also took on the role of archiving Mr. Sunil Kant Munjal’s personal art collection.