We're bringing the drawings of internationally acclaimed Balinese artist Gusti Nyoman Lempad back to Bali.

Lempad, already a long-established architect, sculptor, and painter, was a founder of the Pita Maha association of artists and a leader in the modernization of Balinese arts in 1930s Ubud. His early drawings on paper, created in the 1920s and 30s, left Bali before World War II, scattered to private collections mostly in Europe and America. Few of them have been seen in Bali by the Balinese for 75 years.

"We" are a team of Indonesian, Australian, Dutch, and American writers, scholars, and curators working with Ubud's Museum Puri Lukisan and museums and collectors around the world on the first-ever retrospective exhibition of the drawings of the internationally acclaimed Balinese artist. It opens on 20 September.

With this exhibition, we begin a mulit-year effort to expand the museum's public programs for Bali's artists, art students, and village associations of artists. Lempad's life and work was a bridge from traditional Bali to a modernism still deeply rooted in Bali's Hindu-Buddhist faith. There is still much to learn in his work about the abiding strength of this blessed island's deep culture.

We have raised 90% of our budget to achieve our vision. We now turn to friends of Bali, of Ubud, of Balinese painting, and of the Museum Puri Lukisan for the last $50,000 we need.

The exhibition includes the first comprehensive catalog of Lempad's work with more than 500 reproductions of his drawings and six interpretive essays by scholars of Bali.

Conceived in 2006, this is the most ambitious exhibition ever attempted by the museum that Lempad helped to build in 1956. We are bringing his art back to Bali from museums and private collections all over the world. This is not only the first major Lempad retrospective exhibition and catalog, it is also the first time many of these drawings have been published or even seen outside of private collections or museum storage.