Mithila Museum is an initiative dedicated to the preservation, presentation, and future of Mithila painting. Rooted in one of South Asia’s most distinctive visual traditions, the museum is envisioned as a home for art that carries memory, symbolism, storytelling, and cultural inheritance across generations. While Mithila painting remains at its heart, the museum also seeks to place it in thoughtful dialogue with other community-rooted painting traditions across Asian and AAPI communities, including Korean minhwa, Vietnamese Đông Hồ painting, and Chinese nianhua. Through this wider lens, the museum aims to become both a focused home for Mithila and a collaborative platform for living painting traditions in contemporary life.

This initiative began with a simple conviction: Mithila painting deserves a space where it is treated as central, not peripheral. Historically created in domestic and ceremonial contexts and passed across generations, Mithila painting has grown into a globally recognized artistic tradition. Mithila Museum was conceived to honor that journey and to create a lasting institution where artists, audiences, scholars, and communities can engage with the richness of the form. It is also inspired by the recognition that many AAPI visual traditions carry similar relationships to symbolism, household life, ritual meaning, and intergenerational memory, creating possibilities for future collaboration, exchange, and innovation.

Our mission is to advance Mithila painting as a living art form of global significance through exhibitions, education, research, artist support, and cultural dialogue. We are committed to honoring its lineage, supporting its future, and creating deeper understanding of Mithila painting as an enduring tradition of visual expression, cultural memory, and contemporary artistic voice. We also seek to build a space where Mithila can enter into meaningful dialogue with related painting traditions across Asian and AAPI communities, opening new pathways for collaboration, learning, and contemporary creative practice.