It was an eye opening experience for me to meet other South Asians who were interested in the arts, some of whom pursued them professionally already. After that I began making paintings in my apartment, and transitioned to teaching part-time.Īround the same time, I met artist Jaishri Abichandani, DJ Rekha, and many other inspiring women from the South Asian Women's Creative Collective. My work and my personal life changed dramatically in 1998 when my mother passed away. I decided to get a job teaching junior high school in Washington Heights and then continued to work in education with teens. I thought this was an option for only wealthy folks or people from a family of artists, but never people like me. I felt that this was an impossible career path for me. I reacted so strongly out of my deep frustration. In my final year of undergrad, I remember having an argument with one of my best friends who wanted to apply to the Whitney Independent Study Program, and suggested that I should also think about it. 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. 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. 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. It was not something that anyone I knew growing up even dabbled in. It was not considered economically viable, like a bad trade for all of my family’s hard work. But it seems a bit hazy, because in my family, this kind of career trajectory was not meant to happen. It seems that it must have always been there. The moment when I decided to be an artist? I learned to draw, and paint, and to work with pastels and color pencils. My parents encouraged this and signed me up for art classes when I was about six or seven. As an only child, it was helpful to have tools to create worlds upon worlds of my own.
I came to realize later how these were gendered forms of creativity, thought of as women’s work, or craft. That and sewing, learning embroidery, drawing kolams with my grandmother.
#AMAR CHITRA KATHA GANESH HOW TO#
My first creative endeavour was teaching myself how to write in cursive, when I was five, from a book my mother had bought me. 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. 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 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 remember being visually oriented from a very young age. I was fascinated watching the process of this huge poster coming to life, and the men who were painting it. One of the summers I spent in India I recall sitting in a auto (rickshaw), watching a gargantuan Bollywood poster being made. I lived in Hyderabad for a year with my Masi and Mama, a very significant year for me. 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. Her Nuclear Waters, a work from Atlas, 2013 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?Ĭhitra Ganesh: My story begins in New York in the mid 1970s.
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