Ever since, Halaby has continued to push the limits of oil abstraction obsessively to capture and embody various sensory experiences. Early on, she focused on prismatic refractions. One work, Aluminum Steel (1971), showcases her ability to draw inspiration from rather quotidian sources and experiences. A large-scale meditation in oil on the eponymous material’s interactions with light, the painting asserts Halaby’s vision of metal as “the only substance with colored highlights.” She divides lenticular metallic planes into hundreds of thin bands of color, creating a complex geometric field. Nearby, a hand-painted tone study and framed pencil sketch reveal the careful planning that underpins the painting. The work is a monument to dedication and patience—qualities so evident in her art, that must also have served her well in her career. Like so many women artists of her generation, she has waited for decades for a show like this. And like so many women, she enjoyed institutional recognition as an educator before she received her due as an artist: in 1972 she became the first woman to be appointed a full-time associate professor at the Yale School of Art.

Surely such neglect could warrant a little bitterness over the course of a long career, but if resentment exists within Halaby’s private thoughts, there is no evidence of it in her work. Her experiments are brave and far ranging, and her appetite for formal exploration is voracious. All the while, her use of color is joyful and kaleidoscopic: Mother of Pearl II (2018) features every color of the rainbow in an abstract swirl of mosaic-tile-like shapes. In her hands, abstraction is not a tool for turning her subject into a cipher; rather, it allows the work to open toward something universal—perhaps owing to how Arab art resisted representation long before abstraction was welcome in the United States.

Until the mid-1970s, Halaby was largely preoccupied with diagonal line drawings. In 1976 she left her position at Yale and moved to New York City, where she is now based. There, she settled in with new tools, new perspectives, and a whole new arsenal of geometric forms. Pink Walking Green (1983) is a Tetris-like composition with colorful blocky shapes: Halaby described the work to curator Rachel Winter as an effort to capture the experience of watching a woman in pink walking along the green of her verdant street. By the ’80s, Halaby was working not from photo references or models, but largely seeking to re-create sensory experiences of life in her paintings, including attendant sounds, the feeling of the wind, and the visual interactions of shapes and colors.

Indeed, one is able to intuit a lively interaction in Pink Walking Green, just as Angels and Butterflies (2010) successfully imparts the movement of wings with nothing more than rays of color unfolding at sharp angles. Her interest in capturing motion led her to computational experiments in the mid-’80s: she enlisted Amiga, a newly available personal computer, to craft kinetic visual experiments. The resulting “Kinetic Paintings” (1988–ongoing) reveal an eagerness to try any tool that might unlock new possibilities in abstraction. In later compositions, more explicit figuration returns, but her interest in motion persists: Bamboo (2010) is a stunning and synthesized vision of gentle light seen through leaves and moving in every direction.

Not all the movements she captures are as whimsical as breezes and butterflies. The exhibition’s title derives from an inscription on a watercolor work, Occupied Palestine, that Halaby created during a 1995 visit to Jerusalem, her birthplace. It presents an abstract field of pastel brushstrokes and confetti-like sunbursts, overlayed with punctuating brown and black swoops. Though Halaby only rarely adds text to her compositions, this one bears a handwritten caption. “It is as though I am here to witness the last moments in the life of this beautiful and ancient city of Jerusalem,” Halaby penciled into the bottom margin of the image. “My Jerusalem is being murdered. And I make this painting feeling the pain and beauty of Jerusalem.”

Nearly 30 years since this witnessing, and the murder has only multiplied; meanwhile, in the US, Halaby is one of several artists to have faced professional consequences for taking a stance. “Eye Witness” was initially planned as one-half of a joint exhibition between MSU and Indiana University (IU), where she completed her MFA. But in January, IU abruptly canceled her exhibition, citing vague “safety concerns” and dismissing the artist in a two-line email. The cancellation followed Halaby’s post on Instagram decrying Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

The exhibition catalog, Centers of Energy, went to print before the cancellation, and shares a title with the aborted IU exhibition; it begins with a directors’ foreword cowritten by leadership of the two institutions. There is a tragic irony in the contribution of David A. Brenneman, director of the Eskenazi Museum of Art at IU; he asserts that the museum’s 2017 renovation, including the establishment of its first contemporary art department, advances its purpose “to spark reflective dialogue within our university community around artistic issues that include identity, changing cultural landscapes, and social justice.”

One can hardly think of an artist more perfectly poised fulfill this mission than Halaby, whose work so eloquently bears witness both to injustice and to everyday beauty. The IU cancellation is disturbing and disappointing. Yet it would be regrettable to allow this slight to overshadow the triumph of her MSU solo debut; here, the Broad allows Halaby to serve as a witness, and to be witnessed.

“See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s. The show features the photograph of the unmarred paintings—a chronological outlier but a fitting inclusion given the show’s installation in a gutted and unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. Ten years after his stenciled words, floral patterns, and spray-painted squiggles filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraled ramp, the artist has situated his work in a dramatically less polished setting, one that recalls the degradation of his fire-ravaged studio and rekindles the punk ethos of his earlier days.

In the large, U-shaped venue, coiled cables droop from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiling, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and profane doodles. Abundant windows afford visitors impressive views of lower Manhattan and fill the space with daylight, but continuous wall space is lacking. So as a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted and unfinished walls. One framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs atop a smattering of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as authenticating evidence, if not out of legal requirement.

This property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that dampened demand for office rentals. Hardly the typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to rent the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate himself in order to “loan” his own artworks to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional locations. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, one with dealers likely competing to show (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by the curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to enhance the grittiness of his own work—if it wasn’t so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obfuscation, shifts in scale, distortion, and collage to generate new imagery from preexisting works, circling back while tumbling forward. This is not immediately evident in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and patterns do echo throughout. Numerous paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on view). Between 2020–23, Wool painted atop digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like splotches. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls added by the artist, but one senses that he has generated endless variations from the chance-based images. In turn, one early painting from the series, Untitled (2020), formed the basis for a pair of large silkscreens, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the supersized blobs greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s aptitude for producing difference through repetition.

A highlight of the show is the series of knotty sculptures Wool has been fashioning over the last decade out of rancher’s wire and fencing salvaged around his home in Marfa, Texas—even though they too often disappear into the chaotic background. The jumbled scrap metal evokes tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of forms.His earliest, Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusted barbed wire suspended at eye level like a low-slung chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted cluster of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in a rosy, copper-plated bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal—a dancer in mid-pirouette. For Bad Rabbit (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire formations to heighten the contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to his painted line.

Wool’s painted and sculpted lines converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a re-working of an earlier screenprint, the squared-off stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. At eleven-feet tall, it spans from floor to ceiling and looks custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Farther uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The similar but much larger Crosstown Traffic (2023) towers over visitors in the gleaming new development’s cavernous lobby, demonstrating that the artist can also play nice with the moneyed elite. The version jammed into this exhibition is far humbler: The cloud of black, white, and dirty pink swirls better aligns with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears as if it was unearthed during construction.

Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition in one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (two years ago, he showed many of these works in Xavier Hufken’s pristine new gallery in Brussels). But the site’s ready-made rawness befits his work’s willfully gritty energy. Ultimately, the architecture’s exposed innards draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.

It’s tempting to say that photographer George Platt Lynes was ahead of his time. Between the 1930s and his untimely death at age 48, he produced a body of work—elegant fashion photography, sleek images of nude men—that feel fresh today. But Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a recently released documentary by Sam Shahid, argues that, in fact, Lynes was very much of his time. The ’30s and ’40s in New York saw a bustling scene of gay men who threw fabulous cocktail parties, created art, and, of course, had sex with each other. Hidden Master is quick to remind viewers that plenty of gay men were out in their own way, decades before Stonewall. At the center of this milieu, which is largely understudied, was Lynes. “We see this world that’s gone… through George’s eyes,” says Steven Haas, an art historian and the director of Lynes’s foundation, at the beginning of the documentary.

Toward the end of Hidden Master, Shahid asks several interviewees—including Vince Aletti, Nick Mauss, Mary Panzar, and Bruce Weber—why Lynes isn’t part of the canon. The resounding answer seems to be that they don’t know. It is surprising that Lynes’s images aren’t as prominent as those of his artistic successors like Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. But then again, many of Lynes’s best works went unshown during his lifetime: when he was creating his male nudes, it would have been taboo, if not illegal, to exhibit them. What he did show, in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, was his fashion photography: dreamy images of women in the latest couture. His innovations in that genre include an early form of the now-ubiquitous ring light, which are reflected in his models’ eyes.

Though Lynes wasn’t publicly showing his nudes, he wasn’t exactly in the closet either. His nephew, George Platt Lynes II, says he was one of those people who never needed to come out; his minister father and high society mother did not disown him. In the 1920s, he traveled to Paris and befriended Gertrude Stein and her circle; Stein would eventually appoint him as her official photographer. During one steamship voyage across the Atlantic, he met Julien Levy, who exhibited his work. Through Stein, he met Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler; they would essentially form a throuple for three decades. (Their circle included another famous throuple, artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French, who often collaborated as PaJaMa.) The three lived together on the Upper East Side, at times attempting to pass for roommates. At the height of his fame, Lynes would befriend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet, who also made Lynes the company’s official photographer. Through it all, Lynes made his nudes, gently convincing men—athletes, dancers, sailors, lovers—to disrobe before his camera.

A lover’s death in World War II, the throuple’s dissolution, and another bad breakup led Lynes to move to Hollywood for two years, where he worked for Vogue; there, he lived beyond his means and quickly derailed his career. When he returned to New York in 1948, he had been supplanted in the fashion magazines by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who had rented out Lynes’s former studio. (Lynes did not mince words about Penn and Avedon, whose work he called “spinsterish” and “the all-time low in formula-dreariness,” respectively.) He declared bankruptcy at least twice. Much of his equipment was repossessed by the IRS (his brother bought it back then loaned it to him), and he used a Picasso as collateral for another loan.

Lynes destroyed much of his early work and entrusted the rest to sexologist Alfred Kinsey and painter Bernard Perlin. They live on in various archives, and much of it still has not been exhibited. As dealer Peter Hay Halpert points out, they have been regulated back to the closet. Perhaps they will find new life once again.

The show introduces Cassatt to a new generation. The curators, Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, wanted to get closer to who Cassatt was, to how she wanted to be remembered, and to the legacy of her seemingly serene paintings. They do so by focusing on process. Cassatt, they tell us, was obsessed with work. She constantly worked, toiling to achieve her “casual” auras with light, glimmering colors, modern movement, and, above all, the private pensiveness of her women and her children.

Cassatt’s paintings convey a simplicity—here, now playful greens; here, now a girl in a buggy—but the show reveals that her method is by no means simple. It’s the same arduous careful fight for maximal directness that we see in figures like Marguerite Duras, Yasujiro Ozu, and Clarice Lispector. Cassatt achieved hers by changing mediums; by experimenting with colors; and by being perversely drawn to small-fry subject matter, then mining it from all angles. She mastered the work of printing too: bursting, colorful aquatints and fine drypoint are on display in her glorious “Set of Ten” (1891), 10 Japanese woodblock-inspired prints of Parisian women bathing, sending letters, caretaking.

After being in the presence of so many Cassatts at once—little Françoise reading, ladies at their toilette, boys strangled by loving arms, two girls peering into a map with invisible-to-us borders and oceans—you realize what it is to paint with levity. This does not mean the subject matter, children and opera-boxes and sleepy afternoons, is light.

Throughout the years, Cassatt has borne many labels, which are seldom useful when grappling with the material depth of one of her canvases. “Impressionist.” “Woman painter.” “American.” “Upper-middle-class white.” “Sentimentalist.” “Suffragette.” All these she certainly was. Yet what grabs us is how fierce her battle is for the shade of a dress: raspberry pink. It takes a lot of observation and patience on our part for the mourning-black of a stoic to emerge in Portrait of Madame J (1883)—blurry, as the stoic’s face is, behind a veil, concealing her grief behind still, bleary eyes.

But Cassatt’s interest in work—which means physical labor, yes, and also the hard work of noticing the scrunch of an ignored child’s face as she expresses desire for she-knows-not-what—is not the writhing, heavy work of Paul Cézanne, who was bitterly unsatisfied with his blocky, huffing-puffing apples and his apple-y Madame Cézannes until the end. Nor is it work in the Socialist/Realist sense of Gustave Courbet’s tillers and Jean-François Millet’s gleaners. Cassatt is mesmerized by an everyday labor hidden among the chaise longues, the work it takes to make sure a baby doesn’t die before its time. In other words: the work of attention and love. Perhaps this sort of love is overbearing. Good.

Deborah Solomon claims in her New York Times review of this show that Cassatt “belongs to the second tier of Impressionists” and that she “cannot be said to inhabit the same exalted plane as Degas or Manet.” This ranking business! It’s loathsome, tiresome. Arrêt!

This hierarchy is as boring as the insistence that Cassatt’s subject is as simple as mothers and children, that she knew what it was to be a mother and to draw it (she never had kids), or that “nothing,” outside the moneyed sphere, happens in her work. It is too easy to chide Cassatt for dabbing her birchwood brushes in one hand while stirring her silver teaspoons in the other. Yes, she was of the upper-middle-class American aristocracy, a stockbroker’s daughter. “Ordinary” bourgeois scenes: these were her specialty, that was the weird milieu she knew well. And she keeps it weird, perverting the ordinary. What she does with the subject, like her fellow Americans Henry James and Edith Wharton, is to take a limited perspective on the world and elevate the touched objects and buried feelings piling up around her as the source for unexpectedly subtle rhapsodies of a hierophantic order. Cassatt’s order transcends the mere social mores that serve as the downfall of a Countess Olenska or a Daisy Miller, but not of little Françoise, her child neighbor, reading.

Cassatt moves through her paintings without the touching neuroses of a James, without his curling smoke trails of clauses or qualifying commas. James is nervous he will never perfectly unravel the figure in the carpet, doomed completist that he is; Cassatt is assured, even comfortable, in the incomplete, the unknown of her thinking women. If we want to invest our own thoughts in the trauma of the everyday, if we want to meditate on our own money-love woes, our muttered complaints about cramped arms, we can go to Cassatt’s mother-like nursemaids bearing their baby-like crosses. These aren’t mothers or babies we see. They are the politics of care. Result: we don’t sweat words. We lose ourselves in pigments and blank space.

I keep returning to two paintings. The first is of her child neighbor, Françoise in a Round-Backed Chair, Reading (1909). It is an epitome of meditation. It’s not as radical, formally, as the other Cassatts, which typically render a face or hand in full, sumptuous detail, while leaving the rest of the body and background in a modernist, sketch-like state of incompletion. Nevertheless, Cassatt’s sublime incompletion rears its head when we realize that the book jacket on Françoise’s book is lost, so we can’t tell what she’s reading. Nor can we be sure that she’s even reading it: her eyes look off into an unseen corner of the frame, perhaps into our space. What does she see, if anything? Françoise wanders away from us, from the room, into her own thoughts, solemn yet full of gaiety.

The second is The Map (1890), a black-and-gray drypoint print in which two girls examine a map. Cassatt renders the map as a single line, so that the girls look down on what seems like not a map at all, but a blank piece of paper, even a table. The girls decode the map through a joint effort. And they do it in Cassatt’s unfolding calm.

Cassatt was prolific, creating many mini-worlds, each granularly distinct; within her houses, I want to sit in a chair and daydream. She realizes the advice Henry James theorized in his own preface to Portrait of a Lady—namely, to “place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” in order to “get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” Cassatt, too, captures the unceasing mystery of a face that knows it can’t be known. You feel like you finally, paradoxically, know what it is to be with someone. To lie on the divan as you read and watch them read, or weave and watch them weave, or vibe and watch them be blank-minded, doing “nothing” (quite a whole lot, in fact), meditating. And feeling satisfied with this fragment.

In May, A.i.A. visited Shechet on site at Storm King as she prepared for her show to open. She talked about approaching her work with a sense of humor and sassiness, and accepting the fact that mystery is always part of her process.

Video credits include:

Directed, Produced and Edited by Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography Alan Lee Jensen
Second Cam Op Joseph Kickbush
Sound Nil Tiberi
Arlene Shechet Fabrication photos by David Schulz
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.

It helped that the serpent was animatronic and super stylized—but it took a moment to remember this while my body recoiled. The exhibition was Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s at Canal Projects in New York, which features a cast of robotic contraptions on view through July 27. A lone corn stalk greets visitors at the entryway, its weathered husks suggesting this corn, like other stalks throughout the show, have seen some things. Walk up a few stairs and you stare down at a large pile of dirt on the floor, above which hovers a snake with mechanized wings that flap on occasion. This is the Cincoatl snake, and it’s the star of the show.  

The snake, it turns out, is the corn’s protector. In Mesoamerican traditions, the Cincoatl snake (which is often translated as “snake-friend of maize corn,” per the wall text) defends the crop from forces that might keep it from growing. Surrounding the snake are four Chinantles, barriers made of corn stalks that are said to be an avatar of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, a feathered-serpent deity “related to wind, Venus, the Sun, arts, knowledge, and learning.” With fangs and disquieting marble eyes, the serpents jut and lurch around the exhibition in the four cardinal directions, marking a sacred space. (One of those was the artwork that tried to attack me, but I had come in peace and survived the ordeal. The corn stayed safe, too.)

This installation—commissioned by Canal Projects, a nonprofit space in Lower Manhattan since 2022—tells of corn’s origins while meditating on Indigenous technologies. The wall text refers to the work of Chilean sociologist Luis Razeto Migliaro, who defines Indigenous technologies as tools with the capacity to cultivate life. Indeed, Rodríguez’s sculptures all come to life: Vasijas de barro con cucharas (Clay Pots with Spoon), from 2024, is an arrangement of motorized wooden utensils that clack together, like castanets. Tezcatlipoca (2017) is a tower rising above a cardboard coyote skull and topped with an old CD/cassette/MP3 boombox; from time to time, it swivels on a wheel that rolls below. Cincoatl snake (2024), the centerpiece, goes up and down, seeming to fly, albeit in a very rudimentary fashion.

Using decidedly DIY aesthetics—lots of unkempt nests of wires and circuit boards—Rodríguez makes a show of his contraptions’ elementary qualities in a way that seems to be part of the premise. In a time when technology has started to feel like an inescapable force hell-bent on destroying life, his creations serve as a reminder that it can be a tool for both destruction and creation. The hand-wrought nature of Rodríguez’s intervention offers signs of hope: the made-ness of his robotic forms suggest that some things can be taken apart—and perhaps reassembled anew.

After the procedure continued for several days, Serra realized the task was meant to make both father and son feel better about one another—and that he would have moved that sand anywhere. This autopoietic account summarizes one of Serra’s most important contributions to the history of art: to recast sculpture as a single action carried through until completion, while probing the relation between form and action, as well as what it takes to initiate action. The last part he most explicitly addressed in film and video works (1968–79) that looked at the physiology of muscle reflex and the structures of communication systems, mass media, social justice, and labor organizing.

Much later, in 2001, Serra’s artwork was the first to enter Dia Beacon, when the former Nabisco factory building was undergoing transformation into a museum in Upstate New York. Interior partitions were built around his sculptures, and a spiraling sequence of galleries devoted to Serra was designed to offer a variety of spatial experiences.

Vast volumes bathed in natural light are the norm at Dia Beacon, but walls closely frame the eight Serras on view. Two intimately sized rooms host Scatter Piece (1967) and Elevational Wedge (2001). For the first work, Serra poured hot rubber into pliable strips that are scattered on the floor around a taut line of string suspended some eight inches off the ground. The imaginary plane that the string conjures is a reminder of the fact that there is no such thing as an action in a vacuum—that casting sculpture is always a kind of relational performance. The tension between form and action returns in Elevational Wedge, a perplexing piece for which the floor was slanted downward in relation to an inclined sheet of steel that looks like a ramp even though it remains level with the rest of the ground. Look up from there and your eye meets a window framing the top of Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), a sculpture in which curved plates of steel, one concave and the other convex, rest on each other while calling to mind both the bow and the sail of a ship squeezed into the architecture. Close to that is Consequence (2003), a two-part wall-size drawing that plays with mass in relation to placement.

The sequence of Serra’s works culminates five steps down, in what was once the factory’s loading station. That’s where three many-ton Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) and the equally imposing 2000 (2000) quietly unfurl in a row. Dia Art Foundation commissioned the Ellipses in the mid-1990s and first showed them in an exhibition that opened in Chelsea in 1997. The twisting structures gave Serra the opportunity to work with a new sculptural form that provokes a constantly revolving, involuting experience. They continue to astonish viewers decades later—and surely will for many decades to come. Their scale is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own. Whenever I walk visitors through them, the effect is invariably one of disoriented awe.  

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator, and curatorial department co-head at Dia Art Foundation.

In April, Art in America visited Sikander at Pace Paper Studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she was preparing a new series of works on paper after sending other pieces off to the Palazzo Van Axel in Venice, where her retrospective is currently on view. While she added layers to artworks in various stages of preparation, Sikander talked about distilling ideas from around the globe, drawing as a navigational tool, and engaging history without glorifying it. Watch Sikander at work in the video above, and read more about her in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Eleanor Heartney

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In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “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, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”