Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh is an artist whose work and inspirations exemplifies the balancing and bridging of two identities. She is an American-born artist to immigrant parents from India. She got her degree in Fine Arts from the prestigious Columbia University, but her career as an artist started from more humble means. Since she preferred expressing her own ideas, and reinterpreting dominant narratives, she involved herself with smaller, emerging artist networks in the beginning. More known for her work with visual and handmade arts such as drawings and comic books, she still works across all forms of visual medium to explore gender and the female body in various ways that diverge from the common images she has been exposed to in her experience with comics, histories, and philosophies. Chitra’s works are a true extension of her as a person, and express the multitude of identities she associates with. The art she produces traces back to India and general Asian visual material, street art from living in New York City, femininity, and her reinvention of dominant ideologies she took curiosity in. Little can explain her and her artwork more than her belief that we have to understand the dominant images we have in our minds—where they stem from and why we feel a certain way about them—because ultimately, images and identities are open investigations.

Chitra has a website where she also has a lot of her work posted. Under her installed artwork, I found an installation of hers that I really enjoyed entitled, "Jungle Beneath" (Click here to see "Jungle Beneath" on Chitra's webpage). I find the images and words to be very poetic, and I love that a lot of her work seems mystical and surreal. In terms of how it falls into the Bechdel Test, to me there seems to be at least four women depicted. And they do in some way communicate with each other. I noticed that, in looking through all of Chitra's work, the women all tend to have conversations with themselves. That is, they talk to themselves about who they really are, and the choices that they have made as women. This part of her artwork makes Chitra's work particularly reflexive to me!

 
**Currently, Chitra Ganesh has an installation at the Brooklyn Museum in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.