Arts
Painter Mequitta Ahuja has been re-visioning self-portraiture. While her large colorful canvasses have centrally positioned her own African-American and Indian-American identity, she also claims her own authority as the artist. She emphasizes the work of painting: depicting multiple genres of painting in pictures within the paintings themselves. The result gestures to history, collapses time. and makes new meaning. Ahuja’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her many fellowships and awards include a 2009 residency to the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2014 residency to the Siena Art Institute and a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship award. If you like to learn about the process of making a work of art, this is the podcast for you: Ahuja walks us through the making of her spectacular painting “Portrait of her Mother,” as well as her own evolution within the genre of self-portraiture, and the importance of her mentor Kerry James Marshall.