Between You and Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible, yet play a significant role in the generative space of art-making.

It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It’s on your side, or it’s not. We’re talking about time, and so is the Rubin Museum of Art, one of the biggest-thinking small museums in Manhattan.

I am interested in how certain long-standing shifts in visual culture change our understanding of bodies and language. For example, I wonder about the relationship between selfie culture and feminism.

For the past couple of years, I've been thinking a lot more about the performative nature of protest, from die ins on hospital floors and protestors standing in saltwater for weeks on end, to the fine choreography behind scaling a flagpole to remove a confederate flag. These signs and gestures form a visual vocabulary of resistance that accrues great beauty and power in our image-dominated age.

Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora” was the first exhibition since the Queens Museum’s “Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now” (2005) to focus on works by United States-based artists with origins in the various countries of South Asia.

Nationalism is messy business. But it is mostly business. With it comes a web of attachments like identity and culture. While the United States, despite its popular rhetoric, has never been a truly welcoming country, it is, in words Isamu Noguchi wrote in 1942 from within his somewhat voluntary confinement in an Arizona concentration camp, “...the nation of all nationalities.” But as someone trapped within the liminal space of his biracial identity, he was keenly aware of his own unique perspective, opening this same essay (“I Become a Nisei”) just a sentence earlier proclaiming, “To be a hybrid anticipates the future.”

My story begins in New York in the mid 1970s. My first memories are of Sheepshead Bay, and a blackout during the Summer of Sam, and of the Bengali immigrant families who helped take care of me. I lived in Hyderabad for a year with my Masi and Mama, a very significant year for me.

Pop-art comic figures, surreal multi-limbed bodies, living ghosts; Chitra Ganesh's huge murals are the cave paintings of the modern world, a marker of the schizophrenic lives we lead in a world beset with self-interest, isolation and terror.

In artist Chitra Ganesh’s latest exhibition, Protest Fantasies at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, protest becomes something more than rebellion — it becomes internal.

Feminine, feminist, maker, breaker, aggressive, sensual, intelligent, curious; these are all the qualities that define Chitra’s protagonists. Much of the artist’s practice has been preoccupied with both acknowledging and challenging a monolithic Indian feminine ideal, and that means engaging with the baggage that comes with it. She challenges the normative ideals and expectations that came from the community she grew up in to conform to a vision of the good Indian girl who should find success in a family life of her own.

Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.

This week’s studio: Chitra Ganesh; Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. “I try to spend as much studio time as possible doing what visual artists would like to be doing all of the time—making preparatory sketches, doing visual research, and experimenting with materials and compositions,” Ganesh said, leading me around her Brooklyn studio.

Ganesh has produced an immersive installation-a mural accompanied by vitrines-which features Kali, the Hindu goddess of change. time, destruction, and regeneration as one of the 39 figures originally invited to The Dinner Party. Though Ganesh's work often deals with mythological themes, here she directly explores a particularly significant mythological figure by portraying Kali three times over: as past. present, and future.

By Kavita Das, published in The Aerogram, India

Chitra Ganesh is a South Asian American visual artist who has earned accolades and awards and exhibited her bold and inventive work all over the world. She’s also one of my oldest friends. Not only did we share many common experiences of a desi upbringing in New York City, our mothers were also high school classmates in Calcutta.

With composite figures in dramatic situations drawn using a pool of popular cultural references, Chitra Ganesh explores propositions of beauty and femininity, aesthetics and teratology. Nivedita Magar speaks to Brooklyn-based Ganesh, a leading artist of the South Asian diaspora, about the thematic motivations behind A Zebra Among Horses, her first solo in New Delhi, on display at Gallery Espace, from the 28th of September to the 31st of October.