Mequitta Ahuja
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    • Biography
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    • Open Letter to Weston, CT
    • Demonstration
    • 1,000 Words
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Works on Canvas 2005-2020
  • Artist Statement
  • Digital Portfolio
  • Works on Paper 2005-2020
  • Exhibition Schedule & Press
    • Exhibition Schedule
    • Press
    • Studio and Installation
  • Exhibition Pictures
  • About the Artist: Bio, CV
    • Artist Talk
    • Biography
    • Curriculum Vitae
  • Text and Video
    • Open Letter to Weston, CT
    • Demonstration
    • 1,000 Words
  • Contact
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YOUR CART

My mission is to challenge expectations of the self-portrait, especially the self-portrait of a woman or a person-of-color. I show a woman-of-color articulating her own story and the story of painting. As a female artist-of-color, I have internalized the expectation that I should mine my personal experiences as case studies in the social conditions of race, class and gender. I both accept and step beyond that expectation. I aim to hold and to embody in my work both politics of identity as well as the function of self-portraiture exemplified by Poussin’s 1650 self-portrait: displaying authority within the history and discipline of painting. 
 
To destabilize the genre’s old and current conventions, I merge past and present ideas of self-portraiture. In addition to Poussin, the predecessors informing my approach are Velasquez, Kerry James Marshall and Doris Lessing. For readers of Lessing’s 1962 novel about living in the world as a woman and an artist, The Golden Notebook, Lessing, through her main character’s color-coded notebooks each with a specific writing style and purpose, shows the complex interrelation of artist’s experiences, feelings, intellect, and craft, thereby enacting the relationship between art and its genesis. Using paintings within paintings, I enact the same. My sources are my own art which echoes both the figurative painting tradition and my lived experience­–my mixed Black and Indian heritage, the birth of my son, the death of my mother. Using broad, historical, visual languages, I create intertexts in which all of the works are my own, expanding the woman-of-color’s self-portrait beyond its social context and into a complex narrative of being and making. 
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