Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our hour dedicated to the Brooklyn Museum's 200th-anniversary show with an artist who can remember taking classes at the museum when she was just a kid. Chitra Ganesh grew up in Brooklyn to parents who emigrated from India. She was one of 200 local artists selected following an open call that received almost 4,000 submissions. If you travel through Penn Station at some point this fall, you may have come across her work. Her video installation was selected for the Art at Amtrak series. Her piece on view at the Brooklyn Museum is called All the Farewells, and it's on view through January 26, and Chitra Ganesh is with me now. Hi, Chetra. Nice to meet you.

Chitra Ganesh: Hi, Alison. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Your piece is called All the Farewells. For anyone who is interested in seeing it during our conversation, you can go to our stories now at All Of It WNYC on Instagram or go see it in person on the museum later. First of all, how does the title connect the piece, All the Farewells?

Chitra Ganesh: The title connects with this piece in which the main character seems to be reflecting on some kind of a journey and in the process of saying goodbye of-- but we're not exactly sure what she's saying goodbye to. She is in the process of a loss and transition. Part of what I was thinking about when I made this work is just these endless waves of before and after that we have been experiencing over the last several years, especially during the pandemic, but more recently as well, and this idea of ambiguous grief that that often brings up.

Alison Stewart: Is that why you decided to submit this particular piece of work?

Chitra Ganesh: In my case, this work-- A number of artists who I really love and respect were part of the selection committee for this show, and this piece was selected by the artist Jeffrey Gibson, who was one of the curators for the show.

Alison Stewart: For people who don't have their phones right now, this image features a woman with her back to us, and she's waist-deep in water. There's all kinds of various symbols around. Who does this woman represent to you?

Chitra Ganesh: In some ways, she represents the-- as an individual, she's having this experience of transition. A lot of my work is also interested in how the individual body becomes a vessel or a channel for expressing some of what we might experience as a collective or a body politic or a collective group of people. In this case, she represents the experience for me that many people have right now of being at a crossroads or experiencing a world that is on the edge of a really serious set of apical transitions and thinking about various layers of time as we move through these massive transitions.

Alison Stewart: Now, this work is made with, and correct me if I'm wrong, pigmented inkjet print.

Chitra Ganesh: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That's very interesting. Yes, tell me about that.

Chitra Ganesh: Yes, sure. These works are-- The final work is a print, and it is generated by a collage, merging often like 50 to 60 drawings, some of which are made with pen and ink or brush and ink, some of which are also created on an animator's tablet. I put them together in this, as you were saying, very kind of complex, layered composition where there's many horizons, many shorelines. The form of the final print also is something that I am interested in, echoing the aesthetics of comics and the way in which comics have been a vehicle and one of the first visual forms to talk about science fiction, to address speculation, and for my childhood at least, been a really important part of how I think about more complicated and circular relationship between past, present and future.

Alison Stewart: You grew up in Brooklyn. What neighborhood did you grow up in?

Chitra Ganesh: I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. In Brooklyn, I grew up in Sheepshead Bay and in Park Slope. In Queens, I grew up in Hollis. At a certain point, the museum was just up the block from where I lived, and I spent lots of time there from when I was a kid all the way till right now.

Alison Stewart: Actually, it said that you started taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum when you were 11.

Chitra Ganesh: Yes, I did. There were weekend drawing and watercolor classes, and my parents, who were-- my parents, always really encouraged my interest in art. Although coming from the community and the background that I came from, art was not necessarily considered a profession that was a viable way to be financially stable and support yourself. Nonetheless, they really encouraged me and facilitated my creative exploration. I took art classes, but I also took classical voice, Indian voice classes, and I worked in other forms of art as well, although painting and drawing was always my favorite.

Alison Stewart: What does it mean for you to have your work on display at your hometown museum?

Chitra Ganesh: It is really meaningful for me. I love the concept and ethos of this exhibition. It's very much grounded in some longstanding networks and community of artists. It's multigenerational. Several of the artists who were in the show were artists that I personally have known or met over 20 to 25 years. It's really an amazing opportunity for all of our works to come together and be in this conversation that we are often having in person or through our work over many years.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Chitra Ganesh. We're speaking about her piece which is part of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition called the Brooklyn Artists Exhibition. It's display of 200 local artists who live in the borough. I'm looking at your piece now and you can see that there are references to science fiction in your piece. What attracts you to science fiction as an artist?

Chitra Ganesh: I had always been attracted to fantasy and myth as a kid. Just a way to think outside of reality, as many children are. For me there, I noticed as I was making my work, which was often very much grounded in mythology and classics and antiquities, I noticed that there was a lot of resonance between the language of myth and the language of science fiction in that both of them pose really foundational questions about asking who we are, where are we going, what actually makes us human as opposed to cyborg or siren or any other kind of other form, and also gives us the space to think about where we might be headed as humanity and what constitutes justice.

All of these really central, vital questions that I think are actually couldn't be more urgent for us to think about at this time are part of what I really enjoy about science fiction and speculative thinking. A lot of my work is influenced also by science fiction writing and films like Octavia Butler, like Philip K. Dick, stuff that I grew up reading.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, what are your favorite science fiction go-tos?

Chitra Ganesh: Those are definitely some of them. I've recently been enjoying N.K Jemisin. I loved Battlestar Galactica. I love the way that science fiction has stories nested within stories. The idea of a multiverse that you see in a different way in mythology and all of those elements, that kind of complexity, that there could be many different realities happening at once, I think is a really important way of thinking about the world and thinking about our place in the world that science fiction allows us to access.

Alison Stewart: Yes, really interesting hearing you talk about that. I'm looking at your painting now. You've got hands coming out of the water, holding onto-- I don't know if it's a globe or if it's a sparkling egg. Then you've got another head in the distance peering over everyone. It's interesting you said you work with the inkjet, the pigmented inkjet, because it does give it a comic book feel, sort of. Am I right?

Chitra Ganesh: Yes. If you look at the print more closely, you can see that the colors are quite textured. They have a patterning to them that I want to evoke the way that we used to read printed handheld comics that were printed using a four-color printing process before digital printing. It's that materiality of the image that I think also draws us in and gives us a certain feeling. In terms of the hand which I imagine is holding something that both looks like refuse, but also could be valuable. Thinking about also the figure that is part face, part tree, I was thinking a lot about how even in the midst of a lot of wreckage and transition, there is a quality of light. There is maybe something that we notice floating down the riverbank, some creature that catches our eye. There are all of these other details that really complicate the picture of devastation that we are actually experiencing right now in many parts of the world.

Alison Stewart: When you're in your studio, Chitra, what is the environment that you like to paint in?

Chitra Ganesh: My studio is actually on the floor of a brownstone in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. For me, that environment of being around trees and being in a non-industrial space in a space that I can walk to is really important. That kind of architecture, the brownstone architecture which I grew up with. Actually my studio is on the same block that one of my best friends grew up on. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, which back then we called Crown Heights.

That's one part of it. I'm also surrounded by-- I collect a lot of ephemera, children's book illustrations, postcards, album covers. I'm really interested in all of these different kind of everyday visual languages and also what I have come to think of as the visual language of childhood, which I think is extremely powerful. It's something that imprinted us well before we even entered a museum. It can almost feel like a collective memory bank that can be accessed and I think of comics in this way as well.

Alison Stewart: When you have an idea, what is the first thing you usually do?

Chitra Ganesh: I usually draw in my sketchbook or make some very direct rudimentary drawing of what I'm thinking about. Sometimes I write about the work as well. In the case of All the Farewells, I actually wrote something that I was thinking about and that materialized into the idea for this piece. I think it depends on the medium I'm working in, the kind of approach that I have to that medium, the space that the work is in. For example, with the work that I currently have in Penn Station, which is a series of digital prints that surrounds the Amtrak concourse, but also in the main hall and also wraps around multiple columns, that work is called Regeneration, and it focuses on symbols of resilience and regrowth and sustenance.

I was thinking about the ways in which people who were rushing around this very, very trafficked, hectic, anxiety-producing site might be able to recalibrate and think differently about where they are and remember perhaps that there is an outside to all of this using some of that imagery. In that case, the site was a really big part of symbolism that I chose.

Alison Stewart: You grew up in Brooklyn. There are so many artists in New York who are in positions that you were once in with the hindsight and the experience that you have now. What advice would you give to someone? What's advice that you think you could have benefited from hearing and what's advice you would give?

Chitra Ganesh: I think advice that I was very happy to hear that I did benefit from hearing. I mean, I want to share, actually some things that I did benefit from hearing. I think having really strong networks of friendship and community is really important. I think often there's a feeling, at least when I was coming of age as an artist or I was in grad school, that someone from on high would come and pluck you out of your environment and catapult you into some other space. I think for most people, it's actually just about laying the foundation, brick by brick. A lot of that support that you need comes from those networks of trust built through friendship and community. I would say that that's something that I really appreciate and still live by.

Alison Stewart: What do you hope people will feel after spending time with All the Farewells? We have about a minute.

Chitra Ganesh: I hope that people will feel an ability to move through different layers of time and space and maybe reflect upon their own moment at this crossroads where we are experiencing a lot rapid technological transformation, but a lot of war and destruction as well. For example, in Palestine. I know a lot of people are also processing the election. I think there's a lot of things that are happening right now that put us at a crossroads. I hope that this piece provides a of respite and meditation in this very rapidly transforming world that we live in.

Alison Stewart: You can see All the Farewells at the Brooklyn Museum. My guest has been Chitra Ganesh. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Chitra Ganesh: Such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.