Chitra Ganesh (she/her)

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work encompasses drawing, painting, comics, installation, video art, and animation. A visual artist of Indian heritage, she attempts to reconcile representations of femininity, sexuality, and power absent from the artistic and literary canons. Spanning printmaking, sculpture, and video, her work draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hinduism, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, nineteenth-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images.

Chitra Ganesh holds a BA in art-semiotics and comparative literature from Brown University, and an MFA from Columbia University. She has exhibited widely across the US, Europe, and South Asia, and her work is held in numerous museums, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

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Silhouette in the Graveyard incorporates the figure of Maitreya, a sculpture from the Rubin Museum’s collection, front and center within the frame of the moving time-based image. Maitreya is the Future Buddha, whose prophetic arrival will usher in a new age at a time when the terrestrial world has lost its way. Chitra Ganesh’s narrative approach of incorporating an endless stream of images of contemporary political, social, and ecological upheaval seems in uncanny alignment with the apocalyptic significance of Maitreya’s silhouette.

This object from the Rubin Museum’s collection is presented in the Reimagine exhibition in dialogue with Silhouette in the Graveyard, inviting new ways of encountering traditional Himalayan art.