Shahzia Sikander

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

Solo presentations have taken place internationally at venues including Victoria Miro, London, UK (2026); the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA (2025–2026); Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto, California, USA (2025); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (2025); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA (2022); Morgan Library and 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 (2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2000); 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; MoMA, New York, USA; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan. She has been included in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the 8th and 13th Istanbul Biennials (2003, 2013), the Sharjah Biennial (2013) and the Whitney Biennial (1997). 

Sikander’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions worldwide. She has undertaken site-specific public commissions at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA; University of Houston, Texas, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Sikander’s awards include a MacArthur Fellowship; a Medal of Art 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. Sikander 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, an academician at 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. Its companion, Witness, eighteen feet tall, was exhibited in Madison Square Park before travelling to the University of Houston, where it was beheaded in a highly publicised act of vandalism. Sikander chose not to repair it, leaving the defaced sculpture in full view.

Collective Behavior, a major 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 at Stanford University, which the Cantor describes as its  Asian American Art Initiative’s most significant solo presentation to date. Two monographs (both 2025) document the breadth of Sikander’s work: one published by Monacelli Press in conjunction with Collective Behavior, the other the first chronological study of Sikander's full career, authored 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 the M+ Museum in Hong Kong and ran nightly on the waterfront until 21 June 2026.