Chitra Ganesh in Conversation: Students Shape the Collection

Each year, the Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs)—an interdisciplinary group of Northwestern undergraduates—study museum collecting practices and recommend works of art for acquisition that invite reflection, inquiry, and discussion.

Join us to celebrate the 2024–25 Student Acquisition: two works from She the Question, a series of prints by artist Chitra Ganesh originally published as a 24-page comic book. Known for her subversive visual language, Ganesh draws from pop culture, science fiction, mythology, and Indian visual traditions to challenge dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, and power.

Ganesh will be joined in conversation by assistant professor Lakshmi Padmanabhan (Northwestern, Radio/TV/Film) for a discussion on imagining against caste and patriarchy, exploring the connections between Ganesh’s practice, Indian pulp fiction, and popular cinema. The conversation will be moderated by Laura Brueck (Northwestern, South Asian and Comparative Literature; Director, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities). A member of The Block Museum Student Associates will offer a brief introduction to the student-led acquisition process.

Learn more about the 2024–25 acquisition and hear directly from students about their selection.

Selections from She the Question are currently on view in the exhibition . Block Museum Student Associates will be available in the galleries before and after the program to discuss their acquisition. The galleries will remain open until 8:00 PM.

This program is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and presented with the support of the South Asia Research Forum.

Participation level – light, visitors may choose to participate in the Q&A at the close of the program.

Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975 Brooklyn, New York, USA) received a BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally, including solo shows at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Contemporary Calgary, The Rubin Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, and Gothenburg Kunsthalle. She has participated in the Kochi Biennial, the Dhaka Art Summit, the Hawai’i Triennial, the Asian Art Biennial, and the Sydney Biennial.

Laura Brueck is a Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature and the Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. She is the author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014) and also translates Hindi Dalit short stories into English. She is working on an upcoming book, with the working title Indian Pulp: The Local and the Global in Indian Detective Fictions. With Praseeda Gopinath, Brueck is also co-editing the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan is an Assistant Professor in the department of Radio, TV, Film at Northwestern University. She is working on a book project, Documentary Degree Zero and is the editor of the volume Forms of Errantry, on the filmmaking practices of Miryam Charles, published in 2024 with Union Docs and co-editor of "Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform" a special issue of Women & Performance (2019). Padmanabhan has been awarded a faculty fellowship with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, and the UNDO Colab Fellowship with Union Docs, in Brooklyn, NY. Padmanabhan earned her doctorate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

The Block Museum Student Associates serve as tour guides, public facilitators, peer-to-peer ambassadors for the museum on campus, and in-house student advisors for all levels of museum staff and our Board of Advisors. They lead tours throughout the museum and engage our broad array of campus and community visitors in dynamic conversations about art and ideas that are relevant to our lives today. In addition to this public-facing role, Associates serve as key campus ambassadors for The Block and student advisors for all levels of museum staff and leadership, help to shape programming and projects at the museum, and learn more about museum practice through behind-the-scenes insights and experience. Student Associates span the campus, majoring in English, Philosophy, Economics, Sociology, Global Health, Theater, Journalism, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Social Policy, Radio, Television and Film and more.

Image: Portrait of Chitra Ganesh, Photo by Raul Irani. Courtesy Hales New York

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art