Mequitta Ahuja’s broad oeuvre of self-portraits plumbs the technical history of Western painting while exploring the artist’s identity as a mixed-race woman. The daughter of an Indian father and an African American mother, Ahuja grew up in Connecticut and was largely isolated from Black communities and culture as a child.1 She earned her BFA from Hampshire College and her MFA from the University of Illinois, where she studied under Kerry James Marshall. Like Marshall, Ahuja relies on an extensive fluency in the history of art and an understanding of the implications of style. She has stated that her works aim to “catalog” historical figurative painting techniques and themes, while pushing back against the absence of Black and Brown faces—and voices—within the canon of Western art.2 Painting, for the Ahuja, serves as a means for creating an ongoing “automythography”— a portmanteau of autobiography and mythology borrowed from and elaborating on Audre Lorde’s concept of “biomythography.”3

An early work, Tiger Tiger! depicts the artist in a struggle with the eponymous creature amid a flurry of abstract shapes rising across the canvas. Ahuja took the title of the painting from the final story in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which chronicles the adventures of Mowgli, a human child raised by animals in India. In the story “Tiger Tiger!” (itself a nod to the William Blake poem), Mowgli struggles with his inability to integrate fully in both the human world and that of the animals. He kills the villainous tiger Shere Khan and dances on his hide in the final moments of the story. The triumphant scene profoundly impacted Ahuja, who has described her isolation from both African American and South Asian communities as having resulted in a “perennial lack of fit” much like that of Mowgli.4 Unlike Kipling’s protagonist, Ahuja’s struggle with the tiger remains unresolved, though her expression is suggestive, perhaps, of acquiescence. Throughout the painting, the artist utilized a sgraffito technique, in which she applied layers of paint and then proceeded to scratch away parts of the topmost coat, revealing the contrasting colors below. This is especially prominent in the tiger’s bright blue stripes, which almost glow through thick orange paint on top. The floating abstract forms around the two figures suggest a dreamlike setting where Ahuja’s interests in painting technique merge with her explorations of identity.

Increasingly, Ahuja’s work has turned toward the cultural, personal, and spiritual dimensions of family. After losing her mother to cancer in 2020, she executed a series of paintings that traversed her grief and probed the emotional relationship between the two women. Shedding the dense, studied brushwork of earlier pieces, the blue and red canvases of this series are loosely painted and gestural, using the sgraffito technique seen in Tiger Tiger! as the primary mode of mark making. After covering the canvases with a rich black paint, Ahuja created the figures by way of its removal, slowly carving the image through a subtractive process more often seen in printmaking techniques such as woodblock. Because she used oil paint which dried within a day, the works needed to be created with an urgency that is conveyed in the movement of the figures.5 While many paintings from this series are based on photographs Ahuja took of herself and her mother in the early 2000s, Regenerate depicts Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance in Hindu cosmology. Typically depicted with a drum (symbolizing creation) and a flame (symbolizing destruction), here, in a potent mediation on the irreconcilability of death and grieving, he holds only the latter. The two building-like shapes on either side of the canvas might allude to the proximity of the artist’s and her parents’ houses, as Ahuja had moved next door to her childhood home during her mother’s illness.6 In Regenerate, the space between the two buildings becomes a metaphor for the unbridgeable chasm between the living and the dead.

Ahuja’s exploration of family continues in her most recent paintings, which were shown in the exhibition Black Word at AICON Gallery in New York and are the result of a year of genealogical research into her mother’s ancestors, Henry Briggs Knox and Milly Malica Morris. In her research, Ahuja discovered that Morris, a free woman of color from North Carolina, was able to flee to Indiana with her children, leaving Knox, her enslaved husband, behind. Despite her efforts to purchase his freedom with the help of abolitionist Quakers, Knox remained in North Carolina, and the two never reunited. In As They Please, Ahuja excerpts a line of correspondence between the Quakers regarding Morris’s oldest sons, who, now living in Indiana, “seem to do pretty much as they please” as their mother attempts to earn enough money to free her husband.7 There is an implied judgement in the quote, which tempers the immense relief that Morris must have felt as a woman who ensured the freedom of her children. Ahuja depicts Morris as a Madonna figure whose infant son points at her as he rocks his head toward the viewer. The gesture is ambiguous—either accusatory for her inability to save her husband or acknowledging the fact that Morris was able to secure a hopeful future for her descendants, including, one day, the artist. The painting continues Ahuja’s expanding automythography, which captures not only the nuances and complexities of her identity, but also considers the lives and experiences of the family and ancestors whose lives shaped it.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo