Mequitta Ahuja
Mequitta Ahuja was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1976. She is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work is mainly representation of multicultural heritage and the construction of identity that is depicted in vivid self-portraits and figures.
Ahuja shares the mixed heritage of Indiaand African-American parents, hailing from New Delhi and Cincinnati respectively. she grew up in Cincinnati among largely white people giving her least possibility to make connection with African or Indian culture. Her mixed identity and her upbringing both became the subjects of her later work.
Ahuja received her BA at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1998, and her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003, where she was mentored by contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall.
Ahuja received the attention of famous art critics in early stages of her career. In her debut exhibition in New York cityIn 2007, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter said of Ahuja’s work, “Referring to the artist’s African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition”. Ahuja’s art explores the social construction of issues such as race, gender, and identity through a technique of self-portraiture. To create her paintings, Ahuja relies on a three-step process that involves performance, photography, and drawing/painting. Ahuja begins by developing a series of performances involving costumes, props, and poses. With the aid of a remote shutter, she then photographs her performances and documents them as “non-fictional source material.” Finally, she incorporates these photographs into her invented material, resulting in her completed self-portraits.
Ahuja uses techniques from Mughal manuscript art, Egyptian forms, and early American painting conventions to construct raw, illusionistic canvases that depict both her own alter egos and various modes of painting across art history. She uses her self portraits in a unique way to explore combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.She articulated her own artistic style as “Of primary concern to me is the agency we have to self-invent and self-represent… creative processes that are necessarily bricolage. We draw on personal and cultural history as well as our creative imaginations”. In her projects “Auto cartography I” and “Rhyme Sequence: Wiggle Waggle”, the pictorial styles of the paintings are cross-cultural as well as autobiographical. Ahuja was compelled to study myths, folklore and ancient works as a way to discuss how they are represented in art. She combines her own cultural heritage with the Western art canon to explore stories and imagery related to her experience. Western art historical references are also apparent in Ahuja’s work, from early Italian Renaissance paintings to impressionism and post-impressionism. Combining those Western art cannons with South Asian art traditions, Ahuja is said to “reclaim creative authorship” or agency in her self-portraiture.
Ahuja has discussed her paintings as being feminist, referring to the assertive, self-sufficient female presence prevalent in her work. She frequently turns to her African American and South Asian roots in her consideration of identity issues and cites her work as “automythography,” which is an expansion of feminist Audre Lorde’s “biomythography.” Ahuja describes “automythography” as a “combination of personal narrative with cultural and personal mythology.”
Ahuja through her art exploits her personal experiences and situations to such an extent that they become universal. She sees her art as an opportunity for her to reconnect with her roots. She states that through her art, “I feel I can have relationships to these groups on my own terms.”
In 2007, Ahuja was included in the exhibition Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 2009 her painting “Dream Region”, reflecting her various identities, was featured as the cover of the book War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.
Ahuja often paints over her own work, regarding failed paintings as an opportunity, which “allows for the sort of things you can’t plan for.” Ahuja is also interested in the process, building surfaces by painting, stamping to create a complex surface. “I’m thinking of the ground as a cultural space. Instead of starting with the plain page, I’m starting it with this layer of culture so that when I’m building my imagery, it’s really a wrestle between the figure and the ground. In the end, there’s this integrated, stitched together element between them. . . I’m interested in mixing those traditions: flatness of space, but also some perspectival space and depth into the surface. I think that’s where we are in painting. I think we, as artists, now have free range to take what we want from history.”
In 2008, Ahuja created Tress IV, with the aim to convert the image of African American hair to a “space of infinite creative possibilities or generative possibilities.” Ahuja believes that African American hair is often weighted down with “personal and cultural history.” By exaggerating the image of African American hair, it shows the value that hair has in the lives of black people and how they are constantly evolving the standard of beauty, moving away from a more Eurocentric to Afrocentric idea of beauty.Her two central concerns during this period were “self-invention and self-representation.”
Ahuja’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, India, Dubai, and Milan. In 2010, Ahuja was profiled as an “Artist to Watch” in the February edition of ArtNews, and over the years she has been the recipient of multiple awards for her art, including the Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Grant. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which has been helping select artists expand their practice for nearly a century.
World Art Day
Art is an important aspect of human expression. Art creates, shares and encourages dialogue. It nourishes creativity and gives us opportunity to explore sublime experiences. World Art Day is a celebration to promote the development, diffusion and enjoyment of art. World Art Day is an international celebration of the fine arts which was declared by the International Association of Art (IAA) in order to promote awareness of creative activity worldwide.
A proposal sponsored by BedriBaykam of Turkey and co-signed by Rosa Maria Burillo Velasco of Mexico, Anne Pourny of France, Liu Dawei of China, Christos Symeonides of Cyprus, Anders Liden of Sweden, Kan Irie of Japan, Pavel Kral of Slovakia, Dev Chooramun of Mauritius, and Hilde Rognskog of Norwaywaswas put forward at the 17th General Assembly of the International Association of Art in Guadalajara and accepted unanimously by the General Assembly and it was declared that April 15 will be celebrated as World Art Day, with the first celebration held in 2012. The date was decided in honor of the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was chosen as a symbol of world peace, freedom of expression, tolerance, brotherhood and multiculturalism as well as art’s importance to other fields.
On world art day In his message the director general of UNESCO stated, “This World Art Day is a timely reminder that art can unite and connect us even in the most difficult of circumstances. Indeed, the power of art to bring people together, to inspire, heal and share, has become increasingly clear during recent conflicts and crises, including COVID-19.
