In this episode, The Daily reports on the recent Acquisition of Chitra Ganesh’s work by Block Student Associates, and the reception at the museum this past Wednesday to celebrate the collaboration.
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ALLEGRA LIEF: On this episode of What’s New at NU, we follow artist Chitra Ganesh, who spoke to an audience at the Block Museum on Wednesday, Nov. 5, about three pieces the museum acquired from her 2012 collection, “She The Question.”
CHITRA GANESH: My work was exploring a lot of different kinds of images, languages and archives that I felt were absent from a broader kind of art historical and also national discourse.
ALLEGRA LIEF: Chitra’s work was chosen by a team of 19 students who make up the Block Student Acquisition Team. After narrowing down the artists that they wish to acquire from, the students engage in spirited conversations and debate about the specific work or works that they wish to choose.
Symone Harris, a senior studying social policy, and Tyree Walton, a junior studying environmental science, were student associates this past year.
SYMONE HARRIS: How the acquisition process goes is that we have like a research team that’s not, it’s not like the BMSAs (Block Museum Student Associates), but they will compile a list of artists according to like the theme that we have every year. So originally the theme was horror, and then we were given like a long list of artists to go by. And then through a process of voting and discussing the artwork and the artists and how they worked with accomplishing the Block’s mission and just, you know, all those things, we narrowed it down to Chitra.
TYREE WALKTON: Yeah. And I think it was definitely a unique year because the theme was horror, and then we kind of moved away from it to more of like a dystopia.
ALLEGRA LIEF: Chitra’s pieces acquired by the Block were based on a series of popular Indian comics called the Amar Chitra Katha comics that were widely read during the mid to late 20th century in India.
Laura Brueck, a professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern and director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, helped provide the societal and cultural context for Chitra’s work to the Student Acquisition team. She also helped introduce the night’s discussion.
LAURA BREUEK: She uses the kind of visual vocabulary of these comic books, but inserts all kinds of different feminist and queer and lower castes and other kinds of subjects. What I’ve learned, both working with people, the staff and the student curators and student associates at the Block, and then also bringing my own students to engage in conversation with them, is that it’s not a closed world. Like these images, the art in this museum, the different ways in which you might want to engage with it: those are open to everybody. And we all have something to say, whether we’re quote-unquote trained and looking at art or not.
ALLEGRA LIEF: For almost an hour and a half, Chitra and Professor Lakshmi Padmanabhan, an Assistant Professor of RTVF at Northwestern, sat down and discussed both the three pieces at the Block, “She the Question, She the Garbage Picker,” “She the Question, Patience,” and “She the Question, The History of Encounter,” as well as Chitra’s art and artistic motivations overall.
CHITRA GANESH: Growing up and going to museums and feeling like all of the South Asian culture that was there was sort of calcified in time centuries ago, and everythingrepresented was an artifact rather than a living piece of art.
I don’t think about the imagery that I’m using in that way of “I’m going to tell this story using South Asian imagery.” I think about that imagery as being sort of like it’s not speaking as a marginalized image to a larger context, it’s its own center.
Also, to create works that are both very intimate in scale. Like “She the Question,” which is a lot of the panels are quite small, and I love that about comics, that they could be huge billboards, but you can also read it in the privacy of your lap. I think that kind of elasticity of scale and intimacy of address is so interesting to me about comics.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And thank you so much, Chitra and Lakshmi, for this beautiful conversation.
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CHITRA GANESH: And thank you for your time and attention.
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ALLEGRA LIEF: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Allegra Lief. Thanks for listening to another episode of What’s New at NU. This episode was reported and produced by me, Allegra Lief.
The Audio Editor is Finian Hazen. The Multimedia Managing Editors are Sydney Gaw, Christina Lin and Sarah Serota. The Editor in Chief is Emily Lichty.
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