Between, Beneath, and Beyond: A conversation with Chitra Ganesh & Jared Vadera for the South Asian American Digital Archive
Jaret Vadera: So where does your story begin? Do you remember what first drew you to art? To making things? Was there a moment when you first decided you wanted to be an artist?
Chitra Ganesh: 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.
One of the summers I spent in India I recall sitting in a auto (rickshaw), watching a gargantuan Bollywood poster being made. I was fascinated watching the process of this huge poster coming to life, and the men who were painting it. I remember being visually oriented from a very young age. I was drawn to the handmade, to the materiality, and rawness, of the human hand that touched a surface to create a representation of something else.
I also remember seeing Keith Haring’s chalk drawings on black poster paper all around the NYC subway, and putting my hand over a place that had already been smudged to see if this was indeed drawn with chalk. I couldn’t quite believe that something so striking, piercing, and wild could be made out of the same material used to explain addition and subtraction at school. My first creative endeavour was teaching myself how to write in cursive, when I was five, from a book my mother had bought me. That and sewing, learning embroidery, drawing kolams with my grandmother. I came to realize later how these were gendered forms of creativity, thought of as women’s work, or craft. As an only child, it was helpful to have tools to create worlds upon worlds of my own. My parents encouraged this and signed me up for art classes when I was about six or seven. I learned to draw, and paint, and to work with pastels and color pencils. The moment when I decided to be an artist? It seems that it must have always been there. But it seems a bit hazy, because in my family, this kind of career trajectory was not meant to happen. It was not considered economically viable, like a bad trade for all of my family’s hard work. It was not something that anyone I knew growing up even dabbled in. My mother often reminded me that art was not a financially stable field to enter, but could be pursued as much as I wanted as a hobby. In that way, much of my time was spent feeling like I wasn't really an artist, that I couldn't really be an artist. There was a vibrant scene of South Indian classical forms like carnatic music and bharatanatyam within our community, but these often felt disconnected from my own aesthetic experiences, referents, and aspirations.