Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. For the past 20 years, Ganesh’s drawing based practice has shed light on narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Ganesh’s installations, comics, animation, sculpture, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her studies in literature, semiotics, and social theory have been critical to a steady engagement with narrative and deconstruction that animates her work. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Asia, with solo exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1, The Warhol Museum, Göteborgs Konsthall, Brooklyn Museum, Rubin Museum, Kitchen, and most recently, A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask, the 4^th Annual QUEERPOWER Façade Commission at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City. (currently on view through October 2021).

Her work Sultana’s Dream was recently acquired by the University of Michigan Museum of Art and will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Oh, honey… A queer reading of the collection in fall 2021. Learn more about Sultana’s Dream in UMMA’s online presentation of the exhibition.

Ganesh’s works are held in prominent public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Berkeley Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, among others. She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts; Art Matters Foundation; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, Pollock Krasner Foundation, and most recently the Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2020. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

This presentation is UMMA’s 2021 Doris Sloan Memorial Program. Established through the generosity of Dr. Herbert Sloan, the annual Doris Sloan Memorial Program honors one of the Museum’s most ardent friends and supporters, Doris Sloan, a long-time UMMA docent. Lead support for Oh, honey…A queer reading of the collection is provided by Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard and the University of Michigan Office of the Provost.