Shahzia Sikander - by Sadia Abbas & Jan Howard (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. This lively volume presents her powerful early work, created between 1987 and 2003, from South Asian, West Asian, and Western perspectives, illuminating new understandings for a wide audience. Charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, the book reclaims her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art, especially in Pakistan, international art discourse of the 1990s, and contemporary global practices and debates.

Review Quotes

"Sikander's art dissolves boundaries amid a provocative assemblage of motifs. Within her immersive and vertiginous realm, no compass suffices."-- "Bookforum"

"The latest monograph on Shahzia Sikander (b.1969) is an expansive and critical study on the Pakistani-American contemporary artist which builds upon research from her previous publications in exciting ways. . . . Filled with numerous artworks and a poem by the artist, readers will engage with absorbing essays and interviews that venture into the roots (and continuation) of Sikander's artistic practice."--Nageen Shaikh "Karachi Collective"

About the Author

Sadia Abbas is a scholar, novelist, and associate professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Jan Howard is the chief curator and Houghton P. Metcalf Jr. Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at RISD Museum.