Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander (born March 6, 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) is a Pakistani-American artist known for reviving the practice of traditional Indian miniature painting, or the art of illustrating manuscripts. In addition to painting, her work spans sculpture, installation, animation, and performance. It has been celebrated for its high level of detail and layered visual vocabulary that brings historical narratives into conversation with contemporary issues of race, gender, postcolonial identity, and the immigrant experience.

Education and The Scroll

When, in 1987, Sikander enrolled in the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, the effects of British colonization lingered, despite the country’s having gained its independence 40 years earlier. Miniature painting was unpopular among young Pakistani artists, many of whom had been educated in schools that favored Western traditions of art and saw miniatures as a retrograde practice. Moreover, during imperial rule, a large portion of the region’s painted manuscripts were acquired by Western museums and collections, effectively erasing the once-venerated art form from Pakistan’s popular culture. Sikander nonetheless saw an opportunity to reclaim and reinvent the medium by studying with Bashir Ahmad, one of the few artists trained in the traditional craft of miniature.

In 1990 Sikander completed her thesis project, The Scroll, a 5-foot- (1.5-meter-) long watercolor and gouache painting on tea-stained wasli paper, a type of handmade paper invented in India and traditionally used for miniatures. In the panoramic painting, Sikander depicts herself as a ghostlike, faceless figure weaving in and out of the rooms of her family home. Painted in keen detail, the work recalls 17th-century Safavid paintings with its depictions of everyday life. Female figures, for example, clean floors, while children play with cats, and male figures pack suitcases. At the end of the piece, the Sikander character is depicted outside of the house, painting a self-portrait. Sikander described the work to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where a retrospective of her work was held in 2021: “I was making a statement on the restlessness of youth and the quest for identity,” and, perhaps alluding to the subordinate status of women during Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s years as president of Pakistan (1978–88), under which she grew up, Sikander went on, “The claiming of the freedom for the female body in the domestic setting.” Widely considered her breakout work, The Scroll distinguished Sikander as an artist capable of blending the highly technical and stylized methods of traditional manuscript painting with contemporary concerns.

Move to the United States

In 1993 Sikander moved to the United States, where she had enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. She continued to develop her visual language while grappling with the challenges of being an immigrant and a Muslim woman. The art world at this time both fetishized and excluded multiculturalism. In 2024 Sikander recalled to Art in America, “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were…going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?” She thus created a number of recurring motifs, such as the abstract levitating headless woman in such works as A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation (1993). “Her body is sexualized,” described Kishwar Rizvi, an art history professor at Yale University, “with an emphasis on her exaggerated breasts and rounded thighs, at the cost of all else. There is no head or arms, the latter reduced to ribbons emanating from the shoulder and attached at the hips. The feet are similarly shredded….The avatar is at once a Hindu idol and a Greek deity, but ambiguous in both identifications.” Amorphous yet self-rooted, the feminine, though sometimes androgynous, figure nods to the malleability of identity.

Upon earning an M.F.A. from RISD in 1995, Sikander was awarded a two-year fellowship at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During this time she worked closely with artist Rick Lowe, who cofounded the nonprofit Project Row Houses in the city’s historically Black Third Ward. She began incorporating elements of her new setting—including its charged racial politics—into her existing artistic references. For example, in Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings (1989–97), Sikander sensitively renders a likeness of Lowe alongside European depictions of stereotypical Black figures. The artwork is evidence of Sikander’s penchant for pulling from a wide variety of heritages, cultures, and visual iconographies and putting them into dialogue.

New York and expansion to digital animation and sculpture

Sikander moved to New York City in 1997, where she had been invited to exhibit in the Whitney Biennial as well as at the Drawing Center and the Queens Museum. She ended up settling there, eventually marrying a chemist and having a son. Sikander continued to experiment with different mediums, turning to digital animation in the early 21st century. She has described animation as a natural outcome of her drawings and paintings, which themselves contain narratives and movement. SpiNN, an animation from 2003, depicts the 17th-century Mughal throne room, a historically masculine space, being infiltrated by a throng of gopis, or female cowherds, whose hair transforms into birdlike figures and obliterates the ruler.

While serving on New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers in 2017, Sikander became interested in the creation of sculpture. She told ARTnews in 2023 that was when she was “exposed to tension-ridden situations around public monuments, their complicated histories, historical reckoning, and conflicts between competing visions of history.” Her first sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), seemingly offers two competing ideals of female beauty based on Eastern and Western art history. A type of nude figure recalling 11th-century Indian celestial dancing figures balances on a Venus type who resembles Bronzino’s 1545 painting Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.

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Sikander was also commissioned to create sculptures for Madison Square Park and a nearby court building in New York City. The project, titled Havah…to breathe, air, life (2023; havah translates to “air” or “atmosphere” in Urdu and “Eve” in such languages as Arabic and Hebrew) comprises two sculptures, NOW and Witness, as well as a video animation and an augmented reality experience. The sculptures evoke the abstract female figure of Sikander’s early pieces whose arms and legs had been replaced by tendrils. Unlike earlier versions, however, here both figures have faces resembling Sikander’s and wear their hair braided in coils resembling horns. Both statues received wide praise while on display in New York City, but when Witness was installed on the University of Houston campus in 2024, it drew numerous protests, with the antiabortion Christian group Texas Right to Life calling the sculpture “satanic.” Several months later, a vandal climbed up the sculpture’s hooped skirt and decapitated the work. In response to the troubling episode, Sikander wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post, saying, “As the artist who created the work, I have chosen not to repair it. I want to leave it beheaded, for all to see. The work is now a witness to the fissures in our country.”

Awards and exhibitions

Sikander was the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (2006), the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Art (2012), and the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art (2015). Her work has been exhibited across the globe, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Lahore Biennale 01, and the Venice Biennale. A retrospective of the first 15 years her career, “Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities,” opened at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City in 2021. Met with critical acclaim, the exhibition traveled to her alma mater RISD and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.