Chitra Ganesh

Brooklyn-born Chitra Ganesh works across various media including drawing, painting, mural, sculpture, installation, and moving image to address issues around feminism, queer identity, decolonial futures, power, and social and racial equity. Born to immigrant Indian parents, Ganesh draws on the iconography of Hinduism, Bollywood, and South Asian history and culture, sometimes weaving in lesser-known stories and hxstories of Black and Indigenous cultures often marginalized and excluded in Western art histories and literature. Chitra Ganesh received her BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1996. In 2001 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, and received her MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2002.

Growing up in a tight-knit diaspora community in New York, Ganesh was introduced to Amar Chitra Katha; a well-known series of comics and graphic novels based on Indian mythology, history, and literature, including folktales, fables, legends, and epics, and its pages became a daily part of Ganesh’s life. During her family’s biannual trips back to India to visit family and friends, she encountered hand-painted, billboard-sized posters for Bollywood films in public spaces, along with more intimate art forms such as kolam, the ephemeral flour drawings made by women in front of their homes. She began to understand women not only as strong and complex subjects in Bollywood films but also as makers—a quality less accessible in mainstream American media representations. The disjuncture of what she saw and experienced in her everyday life and that represented in art institutions became an important point of exploration in her work and sparked conversation around creating alternative modes of expressing femininity and power.

In 2020 Ganesh completed her site-specific public art installation A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. The work was part of the museum’s annual public art commission QUEERPOWER, which celebrates queer and transgender histories and futures of downtown Manhattan. Ganesh incorporated imagery of the indigenous flora and fauna found in the area with those that drew on her research into the architecture of seventeenth-century Indigenous Lenape structures and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black settlements Seneca Village and Little Africa. The mural also reminds viewers of the ongoing violence against trans women of color as well as the gentrification that is displacing queer and immigrant communities across the city today.

For HT22, based on her interest in a number of female characters in Polynesian mythologies, Ganesh has developed a new mixed-media mural for the Castle Gallery at Bishop Museum, Honolulu.