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This past February, the Collectors’ Collaborative hosted its first event of the year at the Brooklyn studio of artist Chitra Ganesh (American, born 1975). Established by the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art (BCMA) in 2007 and led by co-chairs Ellen G. McKernan ’06 and Isabel Taube ’92, the Collectors’ Collaborative is a group of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ alumni who meet twice a year at artists’ studios, galleries, art fairs, or museums, typically in New York City. These gatherings offer opportunities for Collaborative members to view works of art, engage directly with artists, and reconnect with one another and members of the BCMA team. Once per year, members of the Collaborative can contribute any amount to a designated fund and vote to acquire a work of art for the Museum created by one of the artists they visited. In this way, Museum stakeholders are empowered to help the BCMA expand its collection in meaningful ways.

Chitra Ganesh has long been an artist of interest to members of the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College campus. As early as 2022, the faculty curators of Without Apology: Asian American Selves, Memories, Futures (December 14, 2023–June 2, 2024) noted the importance and impact of Ganesh’s artistic practice as a member of the South Asian diaspora. The BCMA’s Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow Sean Kramer had also long admired her work, having partnered with her on his previous curatorial project at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Many of the themes that Ganesh engages through her multimedia practice—including gender, queerness, and power—resonate with Kramer’s current exhibition Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now, on view at the BCMA through June 2, 2025. This show features work by contemporary artists who engage with social and political issues—including police violence, transphobia, genocide, and displacement—in ways that resist spectacle and dehumanization. Instead, they emphasize the role that art can play in building empathy and care around topics that are challenging and difficult.

Members of the Collectors’ Collaborative subcommittee expressed enthusiasm about meeting with Ganesh based on the artistic merit of her practice, the campus-wide enthusiasm for her work, and its resonance with themes the BCMA is exploring in its exhibitions and public programs. The group convened in Ganesh’s Brooklyn studio on a snowy Sunday afternoon, where they saw examples from several projects that span painting, drawing, printmaking, and animation. Despite her work in varied media, Ganesh’s practice is united by her ongoing interest in building figurative worlds that draw on South Asian mythology, speculative and science fiction, and comic books and graphic novels.

Among the works that Ganesh showed the Collaborative was the largescale digital print All the Farewells (2023), which immerses the viewer in an imaginative scene that hints at both hope and despair, life and death, and precarity and generative possibility. This work draws on iconography from Ama Chitra Katha, one of the many Indian comic book series Ganesh read while growing up in Brooklyn; to Ganesh, such mid-century comics simultaneously serve as a “repository of childhood memories and the visual memories of childhood.” All the Farewells deals with themes of loss and change, and especially of “the process of saying goodbye to familiar understandings of our world, of our country, and of people we have known—of the series of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ that we have been inhabiting over the last several years.” A protagonist wades into a sea that leads to a surreal landscape stacked in horizontal registers, deliberately devoid of the three-point perspective developed in Renaissance painting. Framing the landscape is a decorative arch that Ganesh interprets as a portal, a recurring concept and theme in her work. Here, the portal functions as “a frame within a frame. You are understanding that you’re seeing something but that you can also step further into the piece and see yet another place.”

Collectors’ Collaborative attendees also saw a new series of nine relief prints called Memories of the Fugue State (2024), which were produced by the master printer Jayasimha Chandrashekar in India. All scenes are set in a nighttime environment and feature a variety of hybrid creatures that combine human, animal, and plant. Aspects of the setting connote the nonlinearity of time and concepts of the multiverse. Ganesh also spoke about her interest in the intersections of ecology, place, and mythology. Her multimedia painting Breathing Water and Air (2024) combines acrylic paint, gouache, ink, chalk, embroider, faux fur, soil, ceramic, and glass. She conceived of the work while in Hawaii, which is reflected in her use of soil from both the islands and Brooklyn. Flowers from the Ojai tree feature prominently, asking viewers to question “what we think of as American and not American.  These flowers are actually part of our national imaginary, even if we may think they look exotic.” Ganesh also played an example of her born-digital work, including Before the War (2021), a 3:57 minute animation featuring music by Saul Williams. Ganesh describes this as “an open-ended narrative of memory, love, and loss” that uses visual storytelling, music, and lyrics to probe connectedness of both personal and political conflict.

While at her studio, Collectors’ Collaborative members had an opportunity to look at works-in-progress, sketchbooks, and studies for larger pieces. After continuing the conversation over food and drink at a neighborhood watering hole, the group dispersed with a sense of excitement and hopes of future opportunities to meet with Ganesh.

If you would like to be involved with the Collectors’ Collaborative, please email CollectorsCollaborative@bowdoin.edu to learn about upcoming events. We would love to see you at our next event, which will take place early this summer.