Chitra Ganesh


Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Ganesh's work across media includes: charcoal drawings, digital collages, films, web projects, photographs, and wall murals. Ganesh draws from mythology, literature, and popular culture to reveal feminist and queer narratives from the past and to imagine new visions of the future.

Early life and education

Chitra Ganesh is the daughter of Indian immigrant parents, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up, she was indulged in the visual representation of Bollywood posters, comics, and literature. As a youngster from a diaspora community, she was exposed to Amar Chitra Katha, which is a popular Indian comic series that focuses on religious and mythological narratives; it was one of her everyday visual references, which existed both at home in New York City and summer trips to India. For generations, children in India and the diaspora have been raised with these comics, which are intended to culturally educate the South Asian population.
Ganesh's interest in ACK is crucial as many of her work reinterpret and redefine the comic. She was fascinated by the history of ACK and its portrayal of women. When she read the comic as an adult, she realized how often information was presented as timeless, trans-historical, and authentic. However, "the comic actually came with its own arguments, prescribed codes of conduct that maintain hierarchies of gender, skin color, and caste among others." Hence, she had a range of experiences reading the comics again as she was interested in how reading with her adult eyes made her realize that comics that were just submerged in her memory banks.
Ganesh graduated from the prestigious Saint Ann's School, and magna cum laude from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001 and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, New York in 2002. Ganesh's studies in literature, semiotics, and social theory paved a way for her to become steadily engaged with narrative and deconstruction that animates her work.
During her time at Brown University as an undergraduate student, she was passionate for semiotics, feminism, post-coloniality, poetry, and translation. At the time, she encountered artists like Jaishri Abichandani, DJ Rekha, and other women from the South Asian Women's Creative Collective, which is an organization for South Asians who were interested in the arts. The late 1990s was an essential timeline for her because she was influenced by the interactions with south Asian female artists and her involvement in a number of progressive communities.
At Columbia University, New York, she focused finding images that reflected her subjectivity in mainstream art and culture that often meant "reckoning with the anthropological colonial lens that prevail in both the selection and contextualization of art objects, alongside disturbing mass mediated repetitions of South Asian subjects circulated in America." As an artist and a scholar, she realized how important it was for her to articulate her own thoughts and approaches to object making and the cultural histories that informed them.

Career

Until 1998, when her mother died, Chitra Ganesh was hesitant about becoming an artist. Having a profession as an artist was nearly non-existent in her community. Also, she thought becoming an artist was "an option for the wealthy folks or people from a family of artists." After graduating from Brown University, she decided to get a job teaching junior high school in Washington Heights and continued to work in education. However, when her mother died, her work and personal life changed dramatically. After the incident, she transitioned to teaching part-time and began painting in her apartment; she declared her career as an artist as she felt that life is indeed very short.
Ganesh is inspired by non-canonical narratives and figures, botched love stories, present-day imperialism, lesser-known Hindu/Buddhist icons, nineteenth-century European fairytales, girl rock, and contemporary visual culture, such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books.
Ganesh's series, The Unknowns—a series of mixed-media works on canvas—explore “the relationship between anonymity, mass-mediated images, and the monumental, in the construction of a feminine iconography.” The series brings to mind large subway advertisements and posters and utilize various techniques including painting, collage, and commercial printing processes.
In “Knowing ‘The Unknowns’: The Artwork of Chitra Ganesh,” Svati P. Shah encourages viewers to consider the formal elements of Ganesh’s work instead of simply viewing them as existing in opposition to the art history canon. Shah describes the origins of the subjects’ of The Unknowns as coming from the “margins of a mythic history” and Ganesh's ability to interrogate "the gaze" through this series.
Another project by Ganesh that sheds light on the construction of feminine iconography is "Eyes of Time," which is a 4.5-by-12 multimedia mural; she deals with themes of femininity, multiplicity, and mythology. There are three figures in the mural that shows "the iteration of feminine power and the cyclical relationship of time." The artist explores the South Asian traditions of Saki, a divine female empowerment, and sacred Indian portrayals of the Greatest Goddess Kali. She not only paints the mural but also associates her work with the collection objects of Brooklyn Museum, which are accompanied with her wall mural.
Ganesh has also contributed to publications such as the anthology Juicy Mother 2, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and was edited by Jennifer Camper. She has held residencies at the , New York University, Headlands Center for the Arts, , and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others.
Ganesh's works have been widely exhibited across the United States including at the Queens Museum, Asia Society, Berkeley Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, along with solo presentations at MoMA PS1, The Andy Warhol Museum, and Goteborgs Konsthalle. International exhibition venues include MOCA, Fondazione Sandretto, Monte Hermoso, Kunsthalle Exnergrasse, Kunstverein Göttingen, and the Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre. Her works are also represented in prominent international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Saatchi Collection, Burger Collection, and Devi Art Foundation.

Awards and honors

Ganesh is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships that include: