The intergenerational artists of the exhibition The World that Belongs to Us draw upon the nuanced colonial history to revisit its ramifications in current times.

This comic is part of a series Drawn to Art: Tales of Inspiring Women Artists that illuminates the stories of women artists in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Inspired by graphic novels, these short takes on artists’ lives were each drawn by a student-illustrator from the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Crafting a career in the arts is notoriously difficult. Sustaining oneself financially while doing so? An art in and of itself. To help those finding their footing, CULTURED asked nine seasoned artists—including Marilyn Minter, Walter Robinson, and Paul Rucker—to shed light on the most unexpected yet effective advice they’ve ever received. Read below for their tips on being sensitive, going on IG live, and navigating workplace relationships.

Artist Chitra Ganesh maps how the visual language of childhood is produced by powerful ideologies, unpacking a nearly ubiquitous Indian food chart as evidence of the Indian government’s attempts to systematically erase a multivalent, secular, and diverse India.

Today, contemporary artists of the South Asian diaspora are exploring futurism, hybridity, and spiritual traditions to shed light on migration and the subsequent search for home. Rajni Perera, Misha Japanwala, Suchitra Mattai, Chitra Ganesh, and Ashwini Bhat draw inspiration from their global ancestries, namely cultures from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Guyana, and India.

Queer Power! A Time Travelling Coloring Book honors LGBTQI+ activists and cultural icons.

The New York-based artist on her influences, ongoing exhibition and being part of the Indian diaspora in the US

We meet Chitra Ganesh and talk about her show, Dreaming in Multiverse at the Frost Art Museum.

‘Orchid Meditations’, the Brooklyn-based artist’s solo in Delhi, offers a glimpse of her new experimental language.

Standing atop ladder placed on a staircase landing, Chitra Ganesh cuts an artistic figure as she fine-tunes a large mural with exacting brush strokes. This is where I first see her, three days before the opening of her solo show, Orchid Meditations at Delhi's Gallery Espace. Her decisive flow and the detailed image of a three-headed woman embracing herself, belie the fact that she only began painting this work a few hours before.

New York City’s Port Authority building has never really been known for its good looks. Rather, the Midtown bus terminal has garnered a reputation for its chaotic grit — and the overwhelming feeling that, at any moment, your bus might leave without you.

A circular gallery at Contemporary Calgary that surrounds the former planetarium’s dome is the perfect space to contemplate the complex multidimensional cosmology created by Chitra Ganesh. Whether it’s a mural, charcoal drawing, mixed-media painting or animation, Ganesh skilfully bends myth and gender stereotypes to create her own unique universe.

On Oct. 3, New York artist Chitra Ganesh was supposed to begin an ambitious mural in the Ring Gallery of Contemporary Calgary. The piece, one of the many highlights of Ganesh’s Astral Dance exhibit, would go on to cover nearly 20 metres of space on the unique curved walls of the gallery. Entitled the Wolf Watcher’s Dream, the site-specific mural showcases a number of the renowned artist’s hallmarks.

Throughout history, and across cultures and continents, there have always been women, sibyls, who possessed secret, sacred knowledges from the healing arts to folklore - and especially clairvoyance. Depending on the context, these figures might be revered, worshiped, sought out or feared, shunned and persecuted, but they always helped usher in the future. Taking this historical archetype as its framework, Cantos of the Sibylline Sisterhood gathers a group of feminist, queer and trans artists working in a range of mediums, all of whom tap into that ancestry, setting ages-old potencies against modern-day threats.

The latest installation in the Murals of La Jolla program is artist Chitra Ganesh's first large-scale public work on the West Coast. "Resurgence," at 7540 Fay Ave., is all about connection, the artist says. Specifically, our connection to other species.

Through a practice anchored in {though not limited to) drawing, Chitra Ganesh has developed a sophisticated iconography and lively illustrative style that synthesizes myriad references to South Asian mythology and religion, comic books, pulp and science fiction, Bollywood posters, and feminist and queer history and theory. Ganesh's exhibition here, "Nightswimmers," processed and responded to the profound shifts experienced during the widespread lockdowns that characterized the pandemic's early months, when life suddenly came to a terrifying and isolating standstill. In contrast to the unruliness of past work, from science fiction- inspired feminist utopias to scenes of violence and body horror, this show felt altogether calmer, offering up moments of respite and reflection. With works installed on dark-purple walls in a dimly lit space, the exhibition evoked, with a contemplative mood, the liminal state between sleep and waking life, a limbo that seems an apt metaphor for the atemporal stupor of the past two years.

Ganesh's painted, drawn and sewn assemblages are like Borgesian libraries or delirious, encyclopedic archives. They combine South Asian cosmologies, Bollywood posters, queer histories, comics and science fiction to suggest hybrid narratives and utopias. Ganesh is at the height of her semiotician-creator powers in her current show, "Nightswimmers."

I’ve had this holographic portrait for decades, having brought it back to the US with me from one of my frequent trips to India as a young adult. It depicts the Buddha and the Dalit scholar B. R. Ambedkar, who became independent India’s first Minister of Law and Justice.

Chitra Ganesh’s art draw on Buddhist and Hindu iconography and pop culture to build a bridge to the idea of home.

For this issue, the artist has conceived this graphic narrative starting from a reflection on the concept of biodiversity, and a meditation on current states of uncertainty and fragmentation. Fusing image and text, she constructs a multilayered narrative that animates the interconnected nature of being.