Bad news, they say, makes good copy.  And that’s particularly true for news about Pakistan in the foreign press – witness the barrage of stories on religious militants and honour killings regularly splashed across its pages.  However, there’s a welcome departure from the norm in the July issue of O , the magazine founded by Oprah Winfrey.  Profiled in its glossy pages is Shahzia Sikander, the 32-year-old NCA graduate who’s taken New York’s art scene by storm – “the exotic priestess” of the “Manhattan gallery crowd,” enthuses the article.

            Shahzia studied miniature painting at the NCA in the early ’90s and her subsequent phenomenal success in the field can be credited with giving a shot in the arm to the previously somnolent miniature department at the institute, and in fact, even further afield.  In O  she is quoted as saying, “There are 20 other artists doing miniature painting just in New York.”  Nevertheless, she dislikes being labelled a miniaturist and sometimes takes critics by surprise with enormous canvases.  Her love for the unpredictable has led her to conduct interesting experiments such as incorporating elements of Hindu mythology into the essentially Muslim tradition of miniature painting.  These experiments are not only limited to her work. For a few years, Shahzia donned the veil and floated around in grocery stores and bars in the US simply “to see how people would react.” 

            Shahzia has had her work displayed at New York’s Whitney Museum, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institute.  Another exhibition is scheduled for this fall at the Asia Society in New York, part of a series titled ‘Conversation with Traditions.’

            Now based in the US after a graduate course from the Rhode Island School of Design, Shahzia’s studio is described by the article in O  as “a loft in a downtown Manhattan industrial building...tidy and spare, though not unwelcoming.”  However, rave reviews notwithstanding, she leads a peripatetic existence, “travelling throughout the country wherever grants take her, working wherever she can find a space.”

            With such an impressive portfolio under her belt so early in her career, this young Pakistani is certainly going places.