When the world emerged from the wreckage of the First World War, it was desperate to look forward. Cities were rebuilding, machines were promising miracles, and a new visual language was needed — one that could make modern life feel beautiful again. Into that moment arrived Art Deco: optimistic, and impossibly confident. Designers like Robert McGregor spoke of a world where there would be “no more poverty, no more ignorance, no more disease” — a vision of the future built from chrome, glass, and speed. Art Deco was modernity with glamour, a celebration of symmetry, geometry, and technological wonder, born from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris that gave the movement its name.

The style’s defining features — hard-edged symmetry, sunburst motifs, stepped forms, aerodynamic curves, metallic finishes, breezy terraces, pastel facades and maritime motifs — captured a world intoxicated by progress. Philosophically, Deco represented Cosmopolitan exchange and a faith in design as a civilising force: it made industry elegant, architecture humane, and cities aspirational, with the belief that design can civilise everyday life without erasing local specificity.

Art Deco Alive! takes that claim seriously, using the centenary as an occasion to reconnect design to civic memory. Conceived as a twin-city festival that pairs Miami and Mumbai — two coastal cities with among the largest surviving concentrations of Deco architecture anywhere, the initiative foregrounds the movement’s transnational reach while insisting that built form is inseparable from social history. Its curatorial premise is to trace connections between material objects, urban spaces and lived narratives beyond just an aesthetic catalogue.

The festival’s centrepiece is the museum exhibition Ocean Drive to Marine Drive: Mapping a Century of Deco | Miami Beach–Mumbai (1925–2025). Curated in collaboration with the Art Deco Mumbai Trust and preservation partners from Miami, the show assembles archival photographs, oral histories, rare artefacts and selected furniture from private collections to map parallel trajectories: South Beach’s pastel hotels and Miami’s Tropical Deco, and Mumbai’s picture palaces, apartment blocks and civic buildings. The aim is comparative and connective; tracking how the same design principles were reinterpreted in different climates, cultures and economies.

Beyond the galleries, a day-long Symposium convenes architects, policymakers and conservationists to debate heritage advocacy in a rapidly changing India; guided walks and documentary screenings make the city into a classroom; workshops and hands-on design sessions engage younger audiences; and a suite of allied events like furniture, jewellery and fashion showcases, retail edits of modern interpretations, and retro food-and-drink pop-ups, invite public participation. The festival’s choreography privileges neighbourhood activation, with Churchgate at the heart of an accessible, street-level celebration.

Art Deco Alive! was founded by Smiti Kanodia with Miami-based co-founders Salma Merchant Rahmathulla and Gayatri Hingorani Dewan —practitioners who have intentionally bridged cultural curatorship and civic entrepreneurship to place preservation alongside creative economies. In Mumbai, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, an institution with deep archival holdings and a recent programmatic renewal, anchors the exhibition, signalling a partnership between contemporary cultural programming and institutional stewardship. A constellation of local stakeholders, from The Taj Mahal Palace to longstanding design and retail institutions, has been allied to the project, underscoring the festival’s civic rather than purely commercial intent.

What Art Deco Alive! articulates most clearly is a proposition about the present: that heritage is not static shrine-work but a form of civic imagination, and that design history can be a productive resource for futures in which preservation and development are interlocutors. The festival therefore turns art deco as an invitation for communities to reread their streets, reclaim cultural memory and imagine urban futures that retain texture, scale and human legibility.

When & where: November 6–25, 2025 (Mumbai); Ocean Drive to Marine Drive is on view at the Special Project Space, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum.

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