Sneak Peek: Mequitta Ahuja Podcast

Jo Reed:  Your mother was African-American, your father is from India, and you’ve said you’ve grown up in predominately white neighborhoods and went to white schools and your multiracial family never really discussed this with you.

Mequitta Ahuja: <laughs> That’s true.

Jo Reed: And the blending of these heritages formed the basis of your work.  In an earlier body of work, you’re just identity front and center.

Mequitta Ahuja: That’s right..  I feel that my work has a kind of dividing line, however, so I have a whole body of work where that identity very much was the central focus of the work and specifically sort of making a whole out of these disparate elements, and then I kind of came to the end of that project.  You know, as you get older, to some degree, the idea of, “Do you accept me?  How do I fit with your categories?” these things become less important, and I became interested in what else I could do with the genre of self-portraiture.  So really thinking about moving self-portraiture away from being about identity, being about the self, and moving it towards ideas about representation, pictorial representation.  So how to make painting that, yes, positions me as I am, as a woman of color, but to not necessarily only talk about that.  To not necessarily only talk about my social condition but to also take an authoritative position in relation to art.