Portrait by Ricardo E Adame
Pooja Pittie (b. 1977, Mumbai, India; lives and works in Chicago) is a painter and fiber artist whose work explores the "bodymind," a concept from disability studies that understands body and mind as a single, inextricable system shaped by lived experience, environment, and the specificities of embodiment. Living with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, Pittie makes work that is inseparable from the reality of a changing body: paintings built in alternating periods of energetic mark-making and rest, and fiber works that developed in earnest as gestural brushwork became more physically demanding. This methodology is a constant cycle of learning and adapting.
Pittie's abstract paintings are built from color as felt sensation, hues chosen not for symbolic weight but for what they do to the body, how they land before language arrives. The emotional residue of motherhood and migration, and a deep interest in movement within an increasingly immobile body, run through the work as persistent undercurrents. Her fiber works—crocheted and knitted vessels and tapestries, translucent forms, works on paper threaded with yarn and linen—emerged from necessity as objects that reward sustained, close attention and labor. Across bodies of work, Pittie insists on the generative potential of constraint, understanding limitation not merely as obstacle but as the very condition from which her practice emerges.
In 2027, Pittie’s work will be the subject of her first institutional solo exhibition, Undercurrent, at Elmhurst Art Museum (IL). Previous solo exhibitions include presentations at McCormick Gallery, Chicago (2024, 2021, 2019), among others. Pittie’s work is held in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; University of Illinois, and University of Chicago.