Western & Southern Galleries (Galleries 232 and 233)
Ticketed. Free for Members. Save $2 when purchasing tickets online.
Friends of South Asian Art, Islamic Art and Antiquities
Press Release
See the exhibition for free on Thursday nights from 5–8 p.m. and during Art After Dark on March 28 and April 25 from 5–9 p.m.
The Cincinnati Art Museum presents Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, a career-spanning exhibition of the internationally renowned, New York-based artist. For more than three decades, Shahzia Sikander (born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) has been reframing South Asian visual histories through a contemporary feminist perspective. Working in a variety of mediums—painting, drawing, print, digital animation, mosaic, sculpture, and glass—she reimagines the past for our present moment. Throughout her practice, she considers diasporic experiences, histories of colonialism, and Western relations with the global south and the wider Islamic world, often through the lens of gender and body politics.
Rather than proceeding chronologically, Collective Behavior follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries throughout her work, rooted as they are in a recurring lexicon of forms, figures, and ideas. The exhibition explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and—perhaps most significantly—as a global citizen engaging with a disrupted historical narrative.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior premiered as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, co-organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art. After Venice, complementary iterations of the exhibition open across Ohio. CAM’s iteration of Collective Behavior is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Sikander’s remarkable career.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is accompanied by a vividly illustrated catalogue featuring scholarly and poetic responses to the artist’s work.
Thursday, February 13, 2025, 5–7 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 2025, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.
Friday, March 28 and Friday, April 25, 2025, 5–9 p.m.
Details coming soon.
Sunday, April 27, 2025, 2–3 p.m.
Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, and earned her BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. She became the first woman to teach in the Miniature Painting Department at the NCA, and was the first artist from the department to challenge the medium’s technical and aesthetic framework. Sikander’s breakthrough work, The Scroll, received national critical acclaim in Pakistan. In 1993, Sikander moved from Lahore to Providence, Rhode Island, to pursue graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After completing her MFA, Sikander moved to Houston, Texas to participate in the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Glassell School of Art from 1995 to 1997. Sikander moved to New York in the late 1990s and further developed her interest in deconstructing miniature paintings as well as questioning identity: what it means to not only be a practicing artist in the United States, but also Muslim, Pakistani, and female. Since 2001, Sikander has been creating digital animations, often on a monumental scale, alongside works on paper, murals, and installations. She has continued to experiment across media in recent years, creating sculpture as well as work in painted glass and mosaic.
She has been exhibited widely since the mid-1990s, with major solo exhibitions at Madison Square Park, New York (2023); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2022); the RISD Museum, Providence (2021-2022); the Morgan Library, New York (2021); the Asia Society Hong Kong (2016); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1999); the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (1998); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1998), among others. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Sikander is the recipient of the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2023); Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize; KB17 Karachi Biennale Shahneela and Farhan Faruqui Popular Choice Art Prize (2017); Inaugural Medal of Art, US Department of State (AIE), Washington D.C. (2012); and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ‘Genius’ Award (2006), among many others. She is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog, published by Monacelli, featuring scholarly and poetic responses to Sikander’s work by contributors including Manan Ahmed, Aruna D’Souza, Bhanu Kapil, Rosalind C. Morris, Fred Moten, and Victoria Sung. The definitive publication on the internationally acclaimed artist, the catalog is available for preorder and releases in February 2025 to coincide with the exhibition opening. Preorder the catalog today at Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Barnes and Noble or find it in our Museum Shop in February 2025.
To accompany the publication of the catalog, Artspace is releasing a limited-edition print of Sikander’s Her-Vimana to support the presentations of Collective Behavior at CAM and the CMA, to be released in February 2025. To inquire about purchasing the limited-edition print, email [email protected].
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is made possible through generous funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support comes from the John and Dorothy Hermanies Fund; Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation; Robert Lehman Foundation; Albert B. Cord Charitable Foundation; Pace Prints, New York; Twelve Gates Arts; anonymous donors, Shakila T. Ahmad; Tanu Bhati; Saba A. Chughtai; Julie and Abhijit Desai; Liz Grubow and Jerry Kathman; JoLynn and Byron Gustin; Syed Zubair Haq; Alina Khan; Zofeen Khan; Samar Kaukab and Haroon Moghul; Helen Little; Soumya S. Patnaik; Ron Pizzuti; Kristi Nelson and Stewart Goldman; and Sara M. Vance Waddell.
Shahzia’s two principal commercial galleries, Sean Kelly Gallery and Pilar Corrias Gallery, have been invaluable supporters and collaborators.