Schwarzman Session: In Betweenness: Art, Culture, Identity, and Femininity

Schwarzman Sessions are peer-led gatherings where conversations generate collaborations and move ideas into action. Because seats are limited, registrants will be automatically placed on the waitlist and will be notified via email if they are selected to participate. 

Art implies movement in time and across formats and mediums. It is a means of imagining and bringing forms to life and connecting space, velocity, magnitude, and direction. How can art serve as a tool for reimagining society, particularly in a time when women’s rights are under threat? In what ways do interdisciplinary collaborations that challenge and transform traditional boundaries between art forms, cultures, and historical narratives speak to the potential of hybrid expressions to redefine our understanding of identity, creativity, and cultural heritage? Join Shahzia Sikander, international renowned Pakistani American multimedia artist and RITM Arts & Practitioner Fellow, for this Session on how art challenges, changes, and enhances our understanding of the world. 

Pioneering Pakistani American, Shahzia Sikander, is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing traditional and historical practice into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent and investigative work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through imperial and feminist perspectives Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculptures explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories.