The visual arts tradition of Bengal, which encompasses present-day Bangladesh, developed under sultanate patronage beginning in the 13th century, then intensified under Mughal rule from 1576 to 1757. Court workshops in Dhaka and Sonargaon produced illuminated manuscripts combining Persian, Central Asian, and local riverine imagery. The Ragamala painting series from 17th-century Bengal, housed in collections including the British Museum and the National Museum in Dhaka, illustrates musical modes through visual metaphor, depicting monsoon rains, riverbank trysts, and the specific architectural forms of Bengali pavilions. These manuscripts employed mineral pigments—lapis lazuli for blue, cinnabar for red, orpiment for yellow—sourced through trade networks extending to Afghanistan and the Deccan. After the collapse of Mughal authority, the patua scroll painting tradition persisted in rural Bengal, where itinerant painters created narrative scrolls on cloth depicting Hindu epics, Muslim saints, and local moral tales, performing these stories in villages while unrolling the scrolls section by section. The Bengal School of Art emerged in Calcutta in the early 20th century under Abanindranath Tagore, who rejected British academic realism in favor of techniques derived from Mughal miniatures and Japanese wash painting. This movement influenced artists in Dhaka including Zainul Abedin, who founded the Government Institute of Arts in Dhaka in 1948, one year after Partition. Abedin's famine sketches from 1943, executed in ink and watercolor, documented the Bengal famine that killed approximately three million people, rendering skeletal figures and dead bodies in spare linear compositions that rejected both colonial aesthetics and romantic nationalism. These works, now held in the Bangladesh National Museum, established a precedent for socially engaged art practice that continued through the independence movement and beyond.
Contemporary art infrastructure in Dhaka centers on institutions established after 1971. The Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka, occupying a campus designed by Muzharul Islam in 1953, trains approximately 400 students annually in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramic arts. The Bangladesh National Museum, relocated to its current Shahbag building in 1983, maintains a collection of approximately 86,000 objects including archaeological material from Mahasthangarh and Paharpur, Mughal-era manuscripts, and post-independence painting and sculpture. The Liberation War Museum, founded in 1996 in the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar neighborhood, documents the 1971 independence struggle through photographs, weapons, documents, and personal effects. Gallery infrastructure expanded in the 1990s with the opening of Gallery Chitrak in 1995 and Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts in 2000, both operating in Dhaka's Dhanmondi neighborhood. The Dhaka Art Summit, initiated in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation, occurs biennially in February, presenting work by approximately 300 artists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East across a converted industrial facility in Tejgaon. The 2023 edition attracted 572,000 visitors over eleven days, making it the largest non-commercial art event in South Asia by attendance figures.
Folk art forms persist through specific craft communities. Nakshi kantha, embroidered quilts made by layering worn saris and stitching them with running stitch in geometric and figurative patterns, originated as a domestic practice among rural women but entered the commercial market after independence, with the nonprofit organization Aarong, established in 1978, employing approximately 65,000 rural artisans producing nakshi kantha for urban and export markets as of 2020. The production method involves washing and layering four to seven saris, then stitching them together with thread extracted from sari borders, creating patterns of lotus flowers, fish, domestic scenes, and geometric motifs across a quilted surface. Jamdani weaving, centered in Rupganj and Sonargaon near Dhaka, produces fine cotton fabric with supplementary weft patterns created by inserting colored threads during the weaving process to form geometric and floral designs. This technique, practiced since at least the Mughal period and mentioned in the accounts of European traders in the 17th century, requires two weavers working simultaneously on a handloom, with production times of one to six months for a single sari depending on pattern complexity. UNESCO inscribed traditional art of Jamdani weaving on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013. The Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation reported approximately 8,000 active jamdani weavers in 2018, concentrated in Narayanganj District, with individual saris selling for 5,000 to 300,000 taka based on thread count and pattern density. Terracotta pottery production continues in Rayer Bazar in Dhaka and in villages near Tangail, where potters shape clay vessels on kick wheels, dry them in shade, and fire them in kilns reaching approximately 900 degrees Celsius, producing unglazed pots used for cooking, water storage, and ritual purposes. The number of active pottery workshops has declined from approximately 2,500 in 1980 to fewer than 400 in 2020, according to surveys conducted by the Bangladesh National Museum, due to competition from metal and plastic containers.
Painting practice since independence reflects political and environmental concerns. S.M. Sultan, working in Narail District from 1953 until his death in 1994, created large-scale figurative oil paintings depicting muscular peasants, laborers, and bulls in compositions that combined social realist subject matter with expressionist color and brushwork. His works, including "Rebellious People" from 1979, measure up to eight feet in height and employ impasto technique with saturated earth tones and reds. Sultan refused to exhibit in Dhaka after 1976, working in rural isolation and giving away paintings to local residents. Retrospective exhibitions at the National Art Gallery in Dhaka in 1976 and at the Asia Society in New York in 2016 repositioned his work within international modernism. Shahabuddin Ahmed, born in 1950 in Narsingdi, relocated to Paris in 1974 and developed an abstract style combining calligraphic forms with references to the 1971 war, executing paintings in acrylic and mixed media on canvas and paper. Rokeya Sultana, working in Dhaka since the 1980s, creates figurative paintings addressing gender violence, producing works such as the "Demon" series from 1995 depicting distorted male figures in dark interiors. Rashid Choudhury, practicing from 1960 until his death in 1986, developed geometric abstractions using traditional Bengali alpana floor painting motifs translated into oil and tempera on canvas. Monirul Islam, born in 1943, produces mixed-media works incorporating jute, bamboo, and found materials referencing rural architecture and agricultural implements, with installations exhibited at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in 1999 and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi in 2014.
Environmental degradation appears as recurring subject matter in recent practice. Mahbubur Rahman, born in 1969, photographs the Buriganga River in Dhaka documenting industrial pollution, tannery waste, and plastic accumulation in color images printed at large scale. These photographs, exhibited at the Chobi Mela International Photography Festival in Dhaka in 2017, show black water, chemical foam, and riverbank settlements among industrial waste. Reetu Sattar, working since 2005, creates video installations addressing climate displacement, including "A Wheelman's Tale" from 2016, a three-channel video documenting rickshaw pullers who migrated to Dhaka from coastal areas affected by cyclones and salinity intrusion. The work combines interviews, aerial footage, and staged sequences filmed in Tejgaon and Jatrabari neighborhoods. Tayeba Begum Lipi, born in 1969, produces sculptures and installations using stainless steel razor blades arranged in patterns referencing Islamic geometric design and domestic craft, creating works that address gender violence and bodily harm through serialized industrial materials. Her installation "I Stitch to Defend Myself" from 2013 arranges thousands of razor blades into a wall-mounted textile pattern measuring approximately 3 by 4 meters.