Chitra Ganesh
Chitra Ganesh
Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. She connects surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South-Asian pictorial forms with contemporary mass-mediated visual languages of comics, science fiction, news photography, and illustration.
Currently on view at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York is an ambitious site-specific installation in the institution’s windows at the corner of Wooster and Grand Streets in SoHo. Ganesh’s yearlong installation draws on early photography and video of queer and trans subcultures and the history of architecture in SoHo, and explores the implications of gentrification on queer life in the city.
She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship. Her works are held in prominent public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York and a BA in Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University and currently lives in Brooklyn. She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, Durham Press and Gallery Espace.
