Mequitta received her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2003, mentored by Kerry James Marshall. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and BravinLee Programs in New York.  She has participated in group exhibitions including Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, Houston Collects: African American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Poets and Painters at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita, KS, and Anomalies at Rossi and Rossi Gallery in Piccadilly, London.

In addition to exhibition catalogues, her work has appeared in Modern Painters, March 2007 and Art News, February 2007.  Holland Cotter, art critic of the New York Times, in his “last chance” article in the June 1, 2007 edition of the Times, citing Mequitta’s NY debut exhibition at BravinLee, stated “Referring to the artist’s African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition.” Mequitta’s works are in notable public and private collections.  Public collections include the Ulrich Museum in Wichita KS, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, U.S. State Department’s Mumbai, India offices and The Cleveland Children’s Clinic. 

I refer to my ongoing project as Automythography. A variation of author Audre Lorde’s coined term for her 1982 book titled A Biomythography, Automythography combines history, myth and personal narrative. Through this form, I insert my subjectivity as a multi-ethnic woman into the historic visual language of drawing and painting. With paint and image, I propose that identity, including racial and gender identities, although narrowly defined by social norms, is both fluid and plural.

Over large paper and canvases supports, I organize small marks into an intricately textured surface. This formal device points to the constructed nature of the image and, in turn, the deliberate and highly constructed presentation of the subject’s identity. I am South Asian Indian and African American. My works are self-portraits. On both canvas and paper, my figures command their environments.

I use two central pictorial devices, inversion of the head and exaggeration of the hair. I depict Black hair as an embodiment of drawing, equating drawn texture to hair texture. In response to the history of Black hair as a barometer of social and personal consciousness, I make the image of hair both physical and conceptual, giving it the psychic proportions hair has in the lives of Black people. I invert the head. Through this disorientation, I signal a shift away from traditional portraiture and into what I call the auto-mythic. This move allows for a profusion of representational types from concrete realism to abstract form and thought. The flow from the head becomes a flow from the mind: a vehicle of infinite possibility.

My works propose art and imagination as primary tools of transformation and self-empowerment. Using myself as the subject, my works are a deployment of those tools a demonstration of self-invention and self-representation.