I adore New York City, and can entertain myself here for hours on end. Wednesday night, I was walking home from visiting a few galleries and came across this incredible window installation at the corner of Wooster and Grand. I think I am starting to think out loud as, at minimum, I heard an audible “wow, Chitra Ganesh!” I was the only person on the street.

I first saw Ganesh’s work through a virtual tour, exactly a year ago, offered by a press I really like in Bucks County, PA, Read this Durham Press blog post from last November. To learn more about this Brooklyn based artist click the link.

Chitra Ganesh: A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask is “Chitra Ganesh’s iteration of QUEERPOWER, our annual site-specific public art installation, imagine a queer space and futurity that is abundant and temporally layered. Incorporating both historical and speculative imagery, this installation celebrates the queer and transgender histories of downtown Manhattan and the neighborhoods adjacent to the Museum’s Soho location. Ganesh transports the viewer into the past and beyond, including imagery drawn from researching architectures of 19th-century Black settlements Seneca Village and little Africa, as well as 17th-century Lenape settlements and structures that have since been destroyed or erased, alongside flora and fauna indigenous to NYC. This work extends the artist’s ongoing commitment to femininity and social formations that are overlooked or excluded from mainstream discourses around queerness and race, to highlight the vibrant queer Asian & South Asian communities that have been influential for the artist. Ganesh’s installation, A city will share her secrets if you know how to ask grounds this future in our present moment, including images of those trans and gender-nonconforming people who have been violently murdered this year, as well as historic queer and trans activists, including those who were lost to COVID.” (Curated by Riya Lerner for Leslie-Lehman Museum of Art)