Mequitta Ahuja

Mequitta received an MFA from UIC in 2003, mentored by Kerry James Marshall. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S as well as in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, India and Dubai. Mequitta has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s 12X12, Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX, BravinLee Programs in New York and Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris, France. Group exhibitions include: Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, Houston Collects African American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Poets and Painters at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita, KS, “Undercover” at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and Usable Pasts at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In addition to exhibition catalogues, Mequitta’s work has appeared in Modern Painters, March 2007 and Art News, February 2007. In February, 2010, Mequitta was profiled as an “Artist to Watch” in ArtNews. Holland Cotter, art critic of the New York Times, in his “last chance” article in the June 1, 2007 edition of the Times,sighting Mequitta’s NY debut exhibition Encounters, stated “Referring to the artist’s African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition.”

I see Feminism as one system of analyzing the formation of private and public identity as well as a political impulse toward freedom equality. There are other such endeavors such as Critical Studies and Afrocentrism. The premise of much of my work is that race exists only as a social construction and not as a fact of biology. Feminist analysis of the construction of gender, was my avenue to better understanding the formation of a racialized individual and group.