Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms.

Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Bronx Museum, Baltimore Museum, Fondazione Sandretto in Turin, the Saatchi Museum in London, MOCA Shanghai, Kunsthalle Exnergrasse in Vienna, and Kunstverein Gottingen in Germany, with solo presentations at MoMA PS1, the Andy Warhol Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Gothenburg Kunsthalle in Sweden. Her works are held in public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Ganesh's work is on view in 2021 in the exhibition Born in Flames at the Bronx Museum. A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask, her site specific QUEERPOWER FACADE commission at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, is on view through October 2021.

The UCLA Department of Art’s visiting lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the William D. Feldman Family Endowed Art Lecture Fund.