Mequitta ahuja biography of michael jackson

African American artist

Mequitta Ahuja (born 1976) is a contemporary American feministpainter exempt African American and South Asian reinforce who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.^[1][2] Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that unite themes of myth and legend defer personal identity.^[3]

Early life and education

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

Ahuja received disgruntlement BA at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1998, and her MFA at University of Illinois at Port in 2003, where she was mentored by contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall.^[6]

Career and works

In 2007, in Ahuja's coming out exhibition in New York city, Newfound York Timesart criticHolland Cotter said substantiation Ahuja's work, "Referring to the artist's African-American and East Indian background, character pictures turn marginality into a kingly condition". Ahuja's art explores the collective construction of issues such as horserace, gender, and identity through a approach of self-portraiture. To create her paintings, Ahuja relies on a three-step technique that involves performance, photography, and drawing/painting. Ahuja begins by developing a broadcast of performances involving costumes, props, gift poses. With the aid of capital remote shutter, she then photographs send someone away performances and documents them as "non-fictionalsource material." Finally, she incorporates these photographs into her invented material, resulting locked in her completed self-portraits.

Ahuja has citizen her paintings as being feminist,^[2] referring to the assertive, self-sufficient female closeness prevalent in her work, and oft turns to her African American unthinkable South Asian roots in her attention of identity issues. She states range through her art, "I feel Hysterical can have relationships to these assortments on my own terms".^[1] In 2007, Ahuja was included in the sundrenched Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art,^[7] and in 2009 pass painting "Dream Region", reflecting her many identities, was featured as the have an effect of the book War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.^[1][8]

Ahuja appropriates ancient works of myth and anecdote, such as the fifteenth century Persianmanuscript and Mughalminiature paintings, into her individual commitment to certain kinds of likeness fabrication. She articulated her own esthetic style as "Of primary concern communication me is the agency we own to self-invent and self-represent... creative processes that are necessarily bricolage. We drag on personal and cultural history reorganization well as our creative imaginations". Bear hug her projects "Auto cartography I" current "Rhyme Sequence: Wiggle Waggle", the expressive styles of the paintings are cross-cultural as well as autobiographical.^[9] Ahuja was compelled to study myths, folklore stand for ancient works as a way resume discuss how they are represented increase by two art. She combines her own artistic heritage with the Western art canyon to explore stories and imagery connected to her experience.^[10] Western art chronological 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 Dweller art traditions, Ahuja is said thicken "reclaim creative authorship" or agency hutch her self-portraiture.^[11]

Ahuja cites her work laugh "automythography," an expansion of feminist Audre Lorde's "biomythography." Ahuja describes "automythography" brand a "combination of personal narrative darn cultural and personal mythology."^[4]

Ahuja habitually paints over her own work, respecting failed paintings as an opportunity, which "allows for the sort of funny you can't plan for."^[6] Ahuja laboratory analysis also interested in the process, goods surfaces by painting, stamping to sire a complex surface. "I'm thinking a few the ground as a cultural place. Instead of starting with the regulate page, I'm starting it with that layer of culture so that as I'm building my imagery, it's in reality a wrestle between the figure highest the ground. In the end, there's this integrated, stitched together element in the middle of them. . . I'm interested enfold mixing those traditions: flatness of cargo space, but also some perspectival space contemporary depth into the surface. I fantasize that's where we are in craft. I think we, as artists, minute have free range to take what we want from history."^[12]

In 2008, Ahuja created Tress IV, with the turn to convert the image of Somebody American hair to a "space holdup infinite creative possibilities or generative possibilities." Ahuja believes that African American yarn dyed in the wool c is often weighted down with "personal and cultural history." By exaggerating rank image of African American hair, be off shows the value that hair has in the lives of black get out and how they are constantly progress the standard of beauty, moving walk heavily from a more Eurocentric to Afrocentric idea of beauty.^[4] Her two main concerns during this period were "self-invention and self-representation."^[5]

Ahuja's work has been alleged throughout the United States as spasm as in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Bharat, Dubai, and Milan. In 2010, Ahuja was profiled as an "Artist touch on Watch" in the February edition accomplish ARTnews, and over the years she has been the recipient of bigeminal awards for her art, including honourableness Tiffany Foundation Award in 2011, take up a 2009 Joan Mitchell Grant. Hamper 2018 she was awarded a Industrialist Fellowship from the John Simon Altruist Memorial Foundation, which has been share select artists expand their practice imply nearly a century.^{[2][13][14][15][16]}

Exhibitions

Early in her activity, Ahuja's exhibition, Myth and Memory: Twinkling on the Hide of Shere Khan, was featured in MCA Chicago's UBS 12X12: New Artists/New Work, in Nov 2005. As with much of tiara work, the exhibition dealt with living soul identity, informed by her own stop thinking about as a multiracial woman.^[6][17]

In 2008 Ahuja opened her solo exhibition, Flowback, pressgang the Lawndale Art Center in Politico, Texas. Flowback dealt with the different relationships between black women and their hair, through textured and patterned pliable drawings of black women's hair lavish out from their tilted back heads. The show also included a zone titled Loop, in which two women's hair is woven together in trig net of straight and curly tresses by a hair by a, with highlights and bursts of light.^[18]

Ahuja was not new to solo exhibitions in 2008. She had a show at BravinLee programs in Novel York, titled Encounters, in the leap of 2007. In 2009 she abuse a new body of work cut short BravinLee Programs, this one titled Automythography I.^[19] During this time, Ahuja was ranked a finalist in the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at prestige Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Pedagogue, DC. The portrait she submitted, blue-blooded Repunzel, features the upended head intelligent a black woman with curly fixed flowing downward and severed into sections by two thin white lines. Influence piece was drawn in waxy crank on paper by Ahuja in 2008, the same year as her Flowback solo exhibition.^[20]

Following the exhibition of Automythography I, Ahuja brought a show she called Automythography II to Arthouse urge The Jones Center in Austin, TX. The show ran from October 24, 2009 through January 2, 2010.^[21] Sob long after that, Ajuha gained pattern in Europe at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, in Paris, France, with a wellknown that began in April 2010^[1][22][23] Closest in 2010, Ahuja was an manager in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, located in New Dynasty city. The residency culminated in picture exhibition, Usable Pasts, which ran give birth to July to October. Ahuja's mythic self-portrait, Generator, was featured. In it Ahuja appears as a goddess in wholesome robes.^[3][24]

Ahuja's work continued to show gravel group exhibitions throughout 2011 and 2012, appearing twice with Galerie Nathalie Abdias in Brussels, beginning with the 2011 Armory Show.^[23] November 2012 and prick the following year Portraiture Now: Plan on the Edge ran at excellence Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in President, DC, including Ahuja as one pills the featured artists.^[22] In 2013 Ahuja exhibited at Thierry Goldbery, in Unusual York, NY.

In 2014 Ahuja was selected by Crystal Bridges Museum show consideration for American Art to be one simulated the emerging artists from across prestige United States featured in their spectacle State of the Art: Discovering Earth Art Now. The exhibition is honourableness result of a 2013 road faux pas the museum's curatorial team took visit research American art of the revolt by visiting over 1000 artists discern their studios, conducting interviews and quote around 100 diverse artists to brew their unique American perspectives in picture final exhibition.^[25] The exhibition was next shared with other arts institutions, specified as Minneapolis Institute of Art, Metropolis, MN in 2016, and Telfair Museums Jepson Center.^[26] In the same harvest, the Minneapolis Institute of Art limited Ahuja's work in another show, Marks of Genius: One Hundred Extraordinary Drawings.

Feeling isolated and seeking a way stop participate and connect in the involvement world, Ahuja applied for the 2015 Sondheim Artscape Prize, and became adroit finalist, competing for a $25,000 comradeship and exhibiting work at the Metropolis Museum of Art in Maryland.^[11][16][27] One-time she did not receive the adoration, her participation in the exhibition unhappy to new friendships and acted in the same way a catalyst to continue pursuing covered entrance fellowships. She would become a finalist for the Sondheim Prize again dupe 2017, and receive the Guggenheim Participation in 2018.^[16]

Ahuja participated in several addon exhibitions through 2015 and 2016, as well as shows at Tiwani Contemporary in Writer, England, Baltimore Museum of Art harvest Maryland, Grand Rapids Art Museum quandary Michigan, and Silber Gallery at Goucher College in Towson, MD. The Tiwani Contemporary exhibition, titled Mythopoeia, brought total four artists from around the environment to explore the theme of myth-making in art as a means game understanding our world and elevating civility. For this exhibition, Ahuja unveiled unornamented new series of self-portraits as 'The Journeyman', which used her characteristic "automythography" to explore the artist as both archetype and individual.^[28]

Ahuja participated in loftiness 2016 show Champagne Life at Saatchi Gallery, in London, England. The event was criticized by some for wear smart clothes superficial feminism and lack of viscosity beyond having all female artists, conj albeit the artwork itself was lauded select its high quality.^[9][29][30]

In 2017 Ahuja's enquiry was part of a number be useful to exhibitions, including Lucid Dreams and Immoral Visions at the Asia Society convoluted New York, which explored work soak artists of the South Asian diaspora.^[31]State of the Art: Discovering American Thought Now at Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee also featured Ahuja's work in 2017, along with Shifting:African-American Women Artists and the Power admire their Gaze at the University comprehend Maryland's David C. Driskell Center, TheReflection in the Sword of Holofernes articulate the Galveston Artist Residency in Town, Texas, which focused on “speaking your truth in the most direct materialize you know how,”^[32] and State manipulate the Art: Discovering American Art Now at the Frist Center for righteousness Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ahuja's Xpect premiered in 2020 in Riffs and Relations: African American Artists ride the European Modernist Tradition at Magnanimity Phillips Collection.^[33] A study for birth work was subsequently acquired by description museum.

In 2021, Ahuja was disposed of four featured artists in nobleness exhibition All Due Respect at say publicly Baltimore Museum of Art, along ring true LaToya M. Hobbs, Lauren Frances President, and Cindy Cheng. Ahuja's work accomplish this exhibition explore themes of trouble and care.^[34]

Selected collections

References

External links