Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1969 and trained at the National College of Arts, Lahore, where she earned a BFA in 1991, and the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received an MFA in 1995. She was a Core Fellow at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 1995 to 1997. Sikander lives and works in New York City.

Solo presentations have taken place internationally at venues including Victoria Miro, London, UK (2026); the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA (2025–26); Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, California, USA (2025); The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (2025); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA (2022); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA (2021); RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, USA (2021); Jesus College, Cambridge, UK (2021); MAXXI, Rome, Italy (2016); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia (2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2000); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA (1999).

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues including Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas, USA; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, USA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan. She has been included in the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the 8th and 13th Istanbul Biennials (2003 and 2013), the 11th Sharjah Biennial (2013) and the Whitney Biennial (1997).

Sikander’s work is held in the permanent collections of institutions worldwide. Her public commissions include works for Princeton University, New Jersey, USA; University of Houston, Texas, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA; and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Sikander’s awards include a MacArthur Fellowship; the Medal of Arts from the US Department of State; the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art; the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Pollock Prize for Creativity; the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Award; and the Artist Impact Award from the City of Newark.

She serves on the boards of Art21, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, is a member of the Asian American Arts Alliance Artist Council and an academician of the National Academy of Design, and has taught at Columbia University and Brown University. She was the Alan Kanzer Artist-in-Residence at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and serves as a mentor on Columbia’s MFA program.

Sikander’s eight-foot bronze sculpture NOW was first installed on the roof of the Appellate Division Courthouse in Manhattan in 2023 and today stands in front of The Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey, USA. Its companion, Witness, eighteen feet tall, was exhibited in Madison Square Park, New York, in 2023 before travelling to the University of Houston, where it was beheaded in an act of vandalism. Sikander chose not to repair it, leaving the defaced sculpture in full view.

Collective Behavior, a survey of Sikander’s work co-organised by the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art, premiered as a Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, travelled to both Ohio institutions and concluded its tour at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, in 2025. Two monographs were published in 2025: one by Monacelli Press, in conjunction with Collective Behavior, and the first chronological study of Sikander’s full career, by Jason Rosenfeld, published by Lund Humphries.

3 to 12 Nautical Miles, Sikander’s 2026 animation co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel and presented by UBS, premiered on the façade of M+, Hong Kong, China, and ran nightly on the waterfront until 21 June 2026.