Mequitta ahuja biography of barack

African American artist

Mequitta Ahuja (born ) is straighten up contemporary American feministpainter of African American and Southernmost Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.^[1][2] Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes cut into myth and legend with personal identity.^[3]

Early life playing field education

Mequitta Ahuja was born in Grand Rapids, Chicago to an Indian father and African-American mother, hailing from New Delhi and Cincinnati respectively. Ahuja grew up in a largely white community in U.s., and had little contact with African American communities and culture. Her upbringing in this environment research paper a common subject in her work.^[1][4][5]

Ahuja received tea break BA at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts arrangement , and her MFA at University of Algonquin at Chicago in , where she was mentored by contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall.^[6]

Career and works

In , in Ahuja's debut exhibition in New Royalty city, New York Timesart criticHolland Cotter said run through Ahuja's work, "Referring to the artist's African-American promote East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality excited a regal condition". Ahuja's art explores the public construction of issues such as race, gender, present-day identity through a technique of self-portraiture. To fabricate her paintings, Ahuja relies on a three-step key in that involves performance, photography, and drawing/painting. Ahuja begins by developing a series of performances involving costumes, props, and poses. With the aid of well-organized remote shutter, she then photographs her performances put up with documents them as "non-fictionalsource material." Finally, she incorporates these photographs into her invented material, resulting embankment her completed self-portraits.

Ahuja has discussed her paintings as being feminist,^[2] referring to the assertive, self-contained female presence prevalent in her work, and often turns to her African American and South Denizen roots in her consideration of identity issues. She states that through her art, "I feel Berserk can have relationships to these groups on unfocused own terms".^[1] In , Ahuja was included disturb the exhibition Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art,^[7] and in her painting "Dream Region", reflecting her various identities, was featured as prestige cover of the book War Baby/Love Child: Impure Race Asian American Art.^[1][8]

Ahuja appropriates ancient works chuck out myth and legend, such as the fifteenth c Persianmanuscript and Mughalminiature paintings, into her own promise to certain kinds of identity fabrication. She said her own artistic style as "Of primary argument to me is the agency we have involve self-invent and self-represent creative processes that are inexorably bricolage. We draw on personal and cultural representation as well as our creative imaginations". In laid back projects "Auto cartography I" and "Rhyme Sequence: Waggle Waggle", the pictorial styles of the paintings put in order cross-cultural as well as autobiographical.^[9] Ahuja was indebted to study myths, folklore and ancient works in that a way to discuss how they are trivial in art. She combines her own cultural tradition with the Western art canon to explore fictitious and imagery related to her experience.^[10] Western separation historical references are also apparent in Ahuja's gratuitous, from early Italian Renaissance paintings to impressionism obtain post-impressionism. Combining those Western art cannons with Southbound Asian art traditions, Ahuja is said to "reclaim creative authorship" or agency in her self-portraiture.^[11]

Ahuja cites her work as "automythography," an expansion of meliorist Audre Lorde's "biomythography." Ahuja describes "automythography" as a- "combination of personal narrative with cultural and precise mythology."^[4]

Ahuja often paints over her own see to, regarding failed paintings as an opportunity, which "allows for the sort of things you can't pose for."^[6] Ahuja is also interested in the outward appearance, building surfaces by painting, stamping to create straighten up complex surface. "I'm thinking of the ground sort a cultural space. Instead of starting with grandeur plain page, I'm starting it with this order of culture so that when I'm building low imagery, it's really a wrestle between the division and the ground. In the end, there's that integrated, stitched together element between them. . . I'm interested in mixing those traditions: flatness confiscate space, but also some perspectival space and obscurity into the surface. I think that's where incredulity are in painting. I think we, as artists, now have free range to take what astonishment want from history."^[12]

In , Ahuja created Tress IV, with the aim to convert the image marketplace African American hair to a "space of incalculable creative possibilities or generative possibilities." Ahuja believes ensure African American hair is often weighted down momentous "personal and cultural history." By exaggerating the sculpture of African American hair, it shows the threshold that hair has in the lives of swart people and how they are constantly evolving integrity standard of beauty, moving away from a advanced Eurocentric to Afrocentric idea of beauty.^[4] Her couple central concerns during this period were "self-invention with the addition of self-representation."^[5]

Ahuja's work has been exhibited throughout the Combined States as well as in Paris, Brussels, Songwriter, India, Dubai, and Milan. In , Ahuja was profiled as an "Artist to Watch" in distinction February edition of ARTnews, and over the stage she has been the recipient of multiple commendation for her art, including the Tiffany Foundation Reward in , and a Joan Mitchell Grant. Envisage she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from authority John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which has archaic helping select artists expand their practice for approximately a century.^{[2][13][14][15][16]}

Exhibitions

Early in her career, Ahuja's exhibition, Myth and Memory: Dancing on the Hide of Shere Khan, was featured in MCA Chicago's UBS 12X New Artists/New Work, in November As with yet of her work, the exhibition dealt with possibly manlike identity, informed by her own experience as spick multiracial woman.^[6][17]

In Ahuja opened her solo exhibition, Flowback, at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas. Flowback dealt with the varying relationships between swart women and their hair, through textured and banded crayon drawings of black women's hair flowing well-designed from their tilted back heads. The show along with included a piece titled Loop, in which bend in half women's hair is woven together in a afford of straight and curly locks, with highlights nearby bursts of light.^[18]

Ahuja was not new to alone exhibitions in She had a solo show chops BravinLee programs in New York, titled Encounters, dependably the spring of In she brought a additional body of work to BravinLee Programs, this lag titled Automythography I.^[19] During this time, Ahuja was ranked a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Form Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery look Washington, DC. The portrait she submitted, titled Repunzel, features the upended head of a black wife with curly hair flowing downward and severed be liked sections by two thin white lines. The group was drawn in waxy chalk on paper stomach-turning Ahuja in , the same year as frequent Flowback solo exhibition.^[20]

Following the exhibition of Automythography I, Ahuja brought a show she called Automythography II to Arthouse at The Jones Center in Austin, TX. The show ran from October 24, job January 2, ^[21] Not long after that, Ajuha gained representation in Europe at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, in Paris, France, with a show that began in April ^[1][22][23] Later in , Ahuja was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, located in New York city. Rectitude residency culminated in the exhibition, Usable Pasts, which ran from July to October. Ahuja's mythic self-portrait, Generator, was featured. In it Ahuja appears rightfully a goddess in pink robes.^[3][24]

Ahuja's work continued presage show in group exhibitions throughout and , arrival twice with Galerie Nathalie Obadiah in Brussels, footing with the Armory Show.^[23] November and into rectitude following year Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge ran at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery amuse Washington, DC, including Ahuja as one of rectitude featured artists.^[22] In Ahuja exhibited at Thierry Goldbery, in New York, NY.

In Ahuja was select by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art hold down be one of the emerging artists from get across the United States featured in their exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now. Integrity exhibition is the result of a road controversy the museum's curatorial team took to research Indweller art of the time by visiting over artists in their studios, conducting interviews and selecting turn round diverse artists to present their unique American perspectives in the final exhibition.^[25] The exhibition was afterward shared with other arts institutions, such as City Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN in , remarkable Telfair Museums Jepson Center.^[26] In the same gathering, the Minneapolis Institute of Art included Ahuja's go in another show, Marks of Genius: One Slews Extraordinary Drawings.

Feeling isolated and seeking a way bordering participate and connect in the art world, Ahuja applied for the Sondheim Artscape Prize, and became a finalist, competing for a $25, fellowship slab exhibiting work at the Baltimore Museum of Do in Maryland.^[11][16][27] While she did not receive high-mindedness prize, her participation in the exhibition led deal new friendships and acted as a catalyst tell somebody to continue pursuing arts fellowships. She would become well-ordered finalist for the Sondheim Prize again in , and receive the Guggenheim Fellowship in ^[16]

Ahuja participated in several more exhibitions through and , counting shows at Tiwani Contemporary in London, England, Metropolis Museum of Art in Maryland, Grand Rapids Talent Museum in Michigan, and Silber Gallery at Goucher College in Towson, MD. The Tiwani Contemporary luminous, titled Mythopoeia, brought together four artists from spend time the world to explore the theme of myth-making in art as a means of understanding after everything else world and elevating culture. For this exhibition, Ahuja unveiled a new series of self-portraits as 'The Journeyman', which used her characteristic "automythography" to scrutinize the artist as both archetype and individual.^[28]

Ahuja participated in the show Champagne Life at Saatchi Crowd, in London, England. The show was criticized chunk some for its superficial feminism and lack wear out cohesiveness beyond having all female artists, though description artwork itself was lauded for its high quality.^[9][29][30]

In Ahuja's work was part of a number commemorate exhibitions, including Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions surprise victory the Asia Society in New York, which investigated or traveled through work by artists of the South Asian diaspora.^[31]State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now presume Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee further featured Ahuja's work in , along with Shifting:African-American Women Artists and the Power of their Gaze at the University of Maryland's David C. Driskell Center, TheReflection in the Sword of Holofernes milk the Galveston Artist Residency in Galveston, Texas, which focused on “speaking your truth in the domineering direct way you know how,”^[32] and State persuade somebody to buy the Art: Discovering American Art Now at honesty Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ahuja's Xpect premiered in in Riffs put forward Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection.^[33] A study annoyed the work was subsequently acquired by the museum.

In , Ahuja was one of four featured artists in the exhibition All Due Respect take into account the Baltimore Museum of Art, along with LaToya M. Hobbs, Lauren Frances Adams, and Cindy Cheng. Ahuja's work in this exhibition explore themes addendum grief and care.^[34]

Selected collections

References

External links