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 and has been based in New York City since that time.

Solo presentations have taken place internationally at venues including 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), among many others.

The artist has been featured in major group exhibitions at venues including the 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).

Her work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, with site-specific public commissions at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA; University of Houston, Texas, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA; Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, 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 most recently 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, 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 Zuckerman Institute of Mind, Brain and Behaviour and currently serves as a mentor within Columbia’s MFA program.

In New York, Sikander’s eight-foot bronze NOW stands permanently on the roof of the Appellate Division Courthouse in Manhattan. Its companion, Witness, eighteen feet tall, was exhibited in Madison Square Park in 2023 before travelling to the University of Houston, where it became the target of a highly publicised act of vandalism. In a widely lauded decision, Sikander chose not to repair it, leaving it beheaded, in full view, so that the work could stand as witness to the very fissures in the country it was made to confront. Collective Behaviour, the major survey 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 has just recently concluded its tour at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the most significant solo presentation of an Asian American artist within Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative to date. Two monographs (both 2025) document the breadth of the work: one published by Monacelli Press in conjunction with the survey, and a landmark standalone chronological study 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 facade of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong and runs nightly on the waterfront until 21 June 2026.