UNESCO and Windmill Move Rickshaw Painting Toward a Global Stage

Dhaka — UNESCO and Windmill Advertising Limited have agreed to carry Dhaka's rickshaw painting past the street corner and into exhibitions, brand work and training rooms, while trying to keep the painters who still live by the craft in paid work.

The memorandum of understanding was signed on 7 October at the UNESCO office in Dhaka. Dr Susan Vize, head of the office and UNESCO representative to Bangladesh, signed for UNESCO. Schumonn Patwary, chief strategic planner of Windmill Advertising Limited, signed for the company. Kizzy Tahnin, head of culture at UNESCO Dhaka, programme assistant Bipasha Tripura, and Md Motiur Rahman Rabbi, Windmill's manager for operations and client service, also attended.

The partnership will run under the title "Rickshaw Painting: Expanding the Canvas." Organisers say the project will train artists, widen the commercial use of the paintings, and connect painters with leading brands. Exhibitions and other promotion, in Bangladesh and abroad, are written into the plan. The point is not only to show the art to a new audience. It is to give painters, who have long been paid job by job for a single panel, another way to sell a skill that the road itself may no longer support at the old scale.

Vize called the practice a living tradition held by the artists, not by an archive. "Rickshaw painting is a living tradition sustained by the knowledge, skills, and creativity of artists who are the core to the survival of the rickshaw painting art form," she said. "Through this partnership between UNESCO and Windmill, we will support artists' livelihoods and help them pass their skills on to younger generations so that the tradition continues to thrive."
The signing follows a listing that already placed the craft on an international register. In 2023, "Rickshaws and rickshaw painting in Dhaka" was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That file treated the whole object as one practice: the workshop teams who build the rickshaw, often in groups of about five, and the painters who decorate the panels at home on commission. Film stars, animals, mosques, flowers and political figures are what most passengers notice. The heritage decision treated those pictures as part of a craft, not as decoration stuck on afterwards.

A listing does not pay a painter. Plastic bodywork, ride-hailing apps and tighter limits on rickshaws in parts of the city have already shrunk the old street market for a freshly painted hood. The new project is meant to answer that gap. Training is supposed to keep the skill moving to younger hands. Brand links and exhibitions are supposed to create buyers who are not waiting at a garage for a new rickshaw. UNESCO's side of the deal is cultural: hold on to the history, the look and the meaning of the art. Windmill's side is commercial: find a market that can survive even if fewer cycle rickshaws are being painted for the road.

None of that is guaranteed by a signature. The MoU sets the frame. What reaches the workshops will depend on whether the training is real, whether brands commission working painters rather than copies of their style, and whether a panel made in a Dhaka lane can travel to a show without the maker dropping out of the trade. If that happens, "expanding the canvas" will mean more than a ceremony at the UNESCO office. If it does not, the listing and the partnership will sit side by side while the street practice keeps narrowing.

The account is based on a press release reported by the Bangladesh Monitor and The Times of Bangladesh.