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 and other underrepresented 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.
Catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition SHAHZIA SIKANDER: NEMESIS held at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, from January 24 - April 11, 2004; and at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, from September 19, 2004 - January 2, 2005.
Growing up in a multigenerational, multicultural home in Lahore, Pakistan, where her family's Muslim traditions are filled with food, rituals, and love, Shahzia is a tomboy who loves skateboarding, biking, swimming, and flying her kite. She also loves stories of all kinds and is always surrounded by books. At the Catholic school she attends, she studies Western literature, and at home, her father regales her and her siblings with fantastical tales from a Russian storybook on animals. Shahzia's love for books leads to a fascination with illustrations, like the ones she sees in illuminated manuscripts and South Asian miniature portraits, and she discovers a talent for drawing. She soon realizes that making art is much like learning a new language--it requires practice and hard work, but it gives her a new tool to express herself. Through art, Shahzia is able to create the different worlds she reads about, using her imagination to take her beyond the walls of the home she grows up in. Written by artist Shahzia Sikander herself and featuring a new painting created especially for the book alongside artwork from her private archive and MoMA's collection, Shahzia: My Life as an Artist is a colorful introduction to a multicultural perspective that will inspire young readers to use art and imagination to explore new worlds.
Is it possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference? This question is the subject of an exhibition that brings together artists who come from the Islamic world. Tapping into certain aesthetic, political, and spiritual notions, this book seeks to highlight the nuanced reactions of each individual artist.
Artists have long been stimulated and motivated by the work of those who came before them—sometimes, centuries before them. Interviews with 120 international contemporary artists discussing works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection that spark their imagination shed new light on art-making, museums, and the creative process. Images of works from The Met collection appear alongside images of the contemporary artists' work, allowing readers to discover a rich web of visual connections that spans cultures and millennia.
Since 2000, The Brooklyn Rail has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. The monthly journal’s continued appeal is due in large part to its diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist’s voice, allowing ideas to unfold and idiosyncrasies to emerge through open discussion. Since its inception, cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the Rail’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for The Brooklyn Rail. This volume brings together for the first time a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha. While each interview is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, collectively they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; The Brooklyn Rail’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference. Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent Rail contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes an introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture. Interviews with Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, Alex Da Corte, Rosalyn Drexler, Keltie Ferris, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Suzan Frecon, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Sheila Hicks, David Hockney, Roni Horn, House of Ladosha, Alfredo Jaar, Bill Jensen, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Matvey Levenstein, Nalini Malani, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Jonas Mekas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Nozkowski, Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Ernesto Pujol, Martin Puryear, Walid Raad, Dorothea Rockburne, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Ryman, Dana Schutz, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, Yan Pei-Ming, and Lisa Yuskavage Special thanks to Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their support of The Brooklyn Rail.
""Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend," wrote author and artist Etel Adnan in a 1998 essay. Barton (American, 1928-1992) was born and raised in New York and settled in the Bay Area in the 1950s. Working primarily in pen or brush and ink, in a kaleidoscopic linear style, Barton ceaselessly recorded the world around him. His intricate sheets capture the intimate interiors and social spaces, lovers and friends, and architectural and botanical subjects that fascinated him. Bringing together more than sixty drawings, two accordion-folded sketchbooks, and printed books and portfolios, this catalogue presents the work of a significant and, until now, unheralded figure of the Beat era. Complementing the images are a deeply researched essay by Rachel Federman, curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, and an excerpt of Adnan's essay, the first and previously the only published account of Barton"--
