"Herald 1", 2004 Enamel & Charcoal on Paper

Mequitta Ahuja is the founding Program Director of Blue Sky Project and singularly responsible for its philosophy, design and structure. In 2005 she was also one of our first four Resident Artists.

A Houston-based painter, originally from Connecticut, Mequitta received her MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003, mentored by artist, Kerry James Marshall. The central conceptual tension of Mequitta's work is between contemporary representations of specific ethnicities and their histories and an idea that spans the history of image making from cave art to renaissance religious depiction to traditional sacred iconography to new-age aesthetics, the universal. Her artistic strategies include creating hybrid forms, stylization of the figure and foregrounding paint as well as image.

Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. She was chosen for the November 2005 12x12: New Artists/New Works at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. A work from that show is in the collection of the Ulrich Museum in Wichita KS. In spring 2007, Mequitta exhibited in the inaugural show of the new Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and also had her first solo show in New York City.

In the fall of 2006, Mequitta relocated to Houston after accepting a two-year residency in the CORE Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

This past summer, I feel the original ideas for Blue Sky, came most fully to blossom. The artists were living together for the first time and that provided an intensity that can’t otherwise be achieved. The rigor with which we all approached our projects and the final exhibition was unlike anything I have ever seen in youth arts programming. I think we all came out of our collaborations with work that we would exhibit as we would any work we had created on our own. This gave the youth participants a truly authentic contemporary artistic experience. As for the artists, we were each given a degree of financial and logistical support for developing our works that typically artists only find from much sought after grants.

Broadly, I would say that the impact Blue Sky continues to have on me is in building my confidence, artistically, the challenge of visually problem solving is maximized by 7-9 people working on one piece, especially without a pre-plan which is how we proceeded this summer on all but one piece. The teens make visual choices I would never make and that both stretches the aesthetics of what I produce and challenges me to make it work as a single piece. Having to pull it together, to make it cohesive, exercises my visual problem solving skills like nothing else. That gives me more confidence to experiment when I return to the studio. Also, working alone, there is so much I take for granted. Having to break it down and explain my process so deeply that the Youth Participants can collaborate with me makes me more artistically self-aware.