Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh has just unveiled a large-scale public video installation at New York’s Penn Station, part of the “Art at Amtrak” series of rotating exhibitions curated by award-winning public art producer Debra Simon and her team. Known for her distinctive graphic and comic style, Ganesh blends South Asian iconography with science fiction and queer feminist theory. Her work celebrates feminine energies and ancestral symbolism, inspiring a deeper symbiosis between living beings, beginning with a reconnection to the inner self.

New York-based Chitra Ganesh’s solo ‘Orchid Meditations’ at New Delhi’s Gallery Espace draws on some of her familiar themes, including Buddhist and Hindu iconography, myth and science fiction, comics and surrealism. In this interview, Ganesh, 48, talks about her influences, being part of the diaspora and why the written word is crucial to her art.

From classical Buddhist texts to early science fiction, Chitra Ganesh speaks of the femme body.

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Chitra Ganesh sat down to have this conversation together via Zoom on November 8th, 2020. This exchange, originally planned for March, had been postponed along with the exhibition due to COVID-19 shutdowns across the United States. They recorded this conversation in the midst of the US election week, and held space for the following curiosities

This conversation between Ganesh in Brooklyn and Jareh Das in Warri, Nigeria, unfolded via Google Meet and several emails. The discussion reflects on unexpected Bollywood connections across South-South geographies, collaboration as an anchor for peer and intergenerational exchanges of ideas, the importance of popular culture as an entry point to overlooked histories, and the rupturing of colonial legacies by the diaspora.

Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh works across media, including drawing, collage, comics and printmaking, animations, videos, and immersive installations. Her figurative work is both formally and conceptually rigorous, drawing on Indian myths and legends, 1960s and 1970s comics, science fiction, pulp movie posters, modernist literature, and subway graffiti. On the occasion of Ganesh’s upcoming site-specific installation, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s QUEERPOWER commission, which will cover the street facing windows of the museum, we talked about this moment of rethinking public space and public monuments, the way comics are uniquely equipped to represent this time of rupture and isolation, modernist narrative strategies, and reimagining archives.

Artist Chitra Ganesh on the cultural iconography that informs her work, working across a wide variety of mediums, and what we can learn from being attuned to process—both other people's and our own.

Ancient mythologies, popular folklore, queer futurisms: in the art of Chitra Ganesh, these seemingly disparate elements swirl together in fantastic combinations as pathways for reconfiguring the present. The Brooklyn-based visual artist’s multivalent practice—which spans drawing, painting, installation, and video—takes cues from the rich visual traditions of South Asia, as well as canonical and contemporary feminist and queer scholarship, and, crucially, her long-standing dedication to collective activism.

Chitra Ganesh’s work traverses worlds and realities, exploring history’s feminist and queer stories and imagining the future. Through her long and successful creative journey, Chitra has asserted the critical agendas and visual stories of brown artists, keeping alive a needed momentum. Her list of inspirations is vast, from Smita Patil, whom she celebrates for her dark-skinned beauty and commitment to parallel cinema, to Keith Haring for ripping through subway tunnels and advertising space with his drawings, to Phoolan Devi for taking revenge on her attackers and occupying space The visual

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.

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.