Chitra Ganesh

Resurgence, 2022
7540 Fay Avenue

13' 9" x 47' 3"
Larry & Tammy Hershfield, Hal & Debby Jacobs – Wall Sponsors

Resurgence is a site-responsive mural by Chitra Ganesh, and the artist's first large-scale public work on the West Coast. Resurgence exudes expansive energy across an activated ocean landscape. The mural work celebrates the twinned realities of San Diego’s extraordinary biodiversity as both cause for celebration and rendering it vulnerable to the threats of climate change and extinction. Its stunning biodiversity combined with habitat loss and climate change means that San Diego is home to one of the highest numbers of endangered species in the United States. Resurgence includes species that have been brought back from extinction, those under threat, and those that have been lost completely. At the same time, the mural includes species indigenous to both California and the East Coast, reflecting the artist’s own location, cohabiting in the space of this work. Rising from the center of the composition, the dynamic main figure floats suspended, in the midst of an ocean, surrounded by a broad range of animal and sea life. Resurgence projects a hypothetical future in which environmental harmony and potential toxicity are intimately intertwined. On the one hand, the multitude of creatures depicted in this complex ecosystem may be endangered or extinct due to humankind’s destructive relationship with the natural environment. On the other hand, other beings pictured in the mural reveal the remarkable resilience of all living things and, as such, their ability to bounce back when given undisturbed and nourishing environmental conditions. Through a mixed media approach, the saturated palette and stylized environment puts forth a dual narrative where the expansive landscape vacillates between dystopia and utopia reminding us of our agency during a crucial turning point in the future health of our planet. 

Chitra Ganesh works across a multitude of media. While rooted in painting and drawing, her work has grown to include animation, comics, mixed media works, video, and sculpture. Ganesh was born in 1975 in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA from Brown University in 1996, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001, and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2002. Ganesh’s visual vocabulary draws from South Asian, science fiction, and graphic pictorial idioms, using narrative and figuration extending to explore contemporary global concerns. Ganesh’s research and source materials draw from mythology, literature, and feminist and queer narratives to trouble conventional ideas of gender, sexuality, and power, to imagine new visions for the future.

Ganesh's work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally including solo shows at Brooklyn Museum, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; The Rubin Museum of Art, NY; Andy Warhol Museum and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA; Gothenburg Kunsthalle, Sweden, with upcoming solo exhibitions at Contemporary Calgary, Canada, and the Frost Museum, Miami. Ganesh’s previous public projects include presentations with Times Square Art Alliance Midnight Moment, QUEERPOWER Façade Commission at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Public Art Fund’s Art on the Grid, and the Billboard project at Socrates Sculpture Park. Resurgence, created for Mural of La Jolla, is the artist’s  first public work on the West Coast.  

Chitra Ganesh’s work is held in prominent public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; ; University of Michigan Museum of Art, MI; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA; the Devi Art Foundation, India; Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, India; the Saatchi Collection, London, UK; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; among others. She is the reception of numerous fellowships and awards, including grants from the the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts; the Anonymous was a Woman Award; Pollock Krasner Foundation; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors; and the Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann

For more info on all the species featured in Chitra’s mural click HERE

We have created an activity sheet for kids to color in and learn more about the mural and all the animal and plant species featured in it.

To download a printer/tablet friendly version of this, click HERE