Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American painter of African American and Indian descent who resides in Baltimore.
Her art explores the social construction of issues such as race, gender, and identity through a technique of self-portraiture that she calls ‘automythography’. Of her work, writer, John Ewing has said, ‘Mequitta Ahuja, whose parents hail from Cincinnati and New Delhi, deploys her own image as a ‘surface’ for ideas about painting, while extending her personal identity into wider cultural landscapes.’
Mequitta’s works have been in numerous exhibitions including Champagne Life at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2016; Marks of Genius: One Hundred Extraordinary Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2014; Portraiture Now: Drawings on the Edge at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 2012-2013; Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2007. Following her debut exhibition in New York in 2007, The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter said, ‘Referring to the artist’s African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition.’