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The breadth and depth of Shahzia Sikander’s art is astounding. As a Pakistani American artist, she covers artistic themes such as feminism, religion and colonialism with methods as varied as miniature painting, glass mosaic, bronze sculpture and digital animation. A current exhibit at the Cantor Arts Center shows numerous artworks spanning over 30 years of her career, the most significant solo show of an Asian American artist associated with Stanford University’s Asian American Art Initiative.
The exhibit, “Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior,” premiered in 2024 at the 60th anniversary of the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international contemporary art exhibition. It was co-organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it showed early in 2025 before moving to the Cantor Arts Center last fall. The Cantor is the exhibit’s only West Coast venue.
Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the Cantor Arts Center’s associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and its Asian American Art Initiative co-founder and co-director, curated the exhibit for the Cantor. She said that the name of the exhibit, “Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior,” refers to various themes in Sikander’s artmaking.
One theme is Sikander’s focus on women in her art. “I think it’s a kind of reference of the collecting of these female forms and looking at their collective behavior across time in her practice,” noted Alexander.
Another theme is her collaboration with other artists: “Shahzia is a very collaborative artist … that’s really crucial to her practice, so it’s kind of like a collective coming together to make her work and to make the show.”
An early portrait
Sikander has an impressive résumé. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1969, Sikander received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1991. She became the first woman to teach in the college’s Miniature Painting Department and moved to the United States in the mid-’90s to get her Master of Fine Arts at Rhode Island School of Design.
Since receiving her MFA, she has lived in the United States, mainly in New York, and has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius” Award in 2006 and the Pollock Prize for Creativity from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2023. She has also exhibited her art in museums and galleries across the world, including the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia.
Sikander dedicated the “Collective Behavior” exhibit to her father, who died in 2021. Next to a pencil-drawn portrait of him named “Abba” from 1987-88, the label text reads: “Sikander Rashid Ahmed (1936-2021), in memory of his unconditional love. He remains her source of resilience and insight to this day.”
Alexander said, “It’s a very tender, delicate drawing and it also shows how adept she already was as a draftsperson at that early age (18-19), and drawing really is at the center of Shahzia’s practice.”
A feminist lens
In addition to drawing, miniature painting forms the basis of Sikander’s art, which originates in historic illustrated manuscripts in Indo Persia. These are detailed and colorful narrative book illustrations, often focused on courtly and royal themes with stylized settings and figures — mostly men. Sikander has been a leader in the contemporary reinvention of manuscript painting by expanding the forms and themes of the genre. She has experimented with scale in these pieces and also animated her work.
She has also created miniature works through a feminist lens.
Starting with her Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis project in 1989, “The Scroll,” she used miniature painting techniques to illustrate her life as an adolescent in Pakistan, growing up during a military dictatorship that limited women’s rights. The scroll is more than 5 feet long, which is unusual for a typical miniature book illustration, and the story takes place across time and space. We see a young woman in a home setting, living among family members, servants and pets. At the right side of the scroll, the young woman paints a self-portrait, illustrating that she has become an artist and taken her destiny into her own hands, literally, in spite of conservative social attitudes toward women at the time.
A piece that’s also in grand scale, but made with a very different medium is an 8-foot-tall sculpture called “NOW” from 2023. Located in the entrance hall, it is the first artwork that greets the visitor at the Cantor Arts Center. Made of patinated (aged) bronze, it shows a large female form with tentacles instead of feet, a lotus base and hair shaped into ram’s horns. The tentacles represent a self-rooted female who transcends geography, culture, religion and time. The lotus symbolizes wisdom in Hindu iconography as a pedestal for deities.
The sculpture also has a decorative collar motif associated with the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The piece was initially installed on top of the New York State Supreme Court building in Manhattan.
Alexander noted that the title “‘NOW,’ “is like a reference to the immediacy of our moment and having a kind of monumental iconic female form as something we need right now… (a) very powerful female form, kind of standing guard.” Alexander further explained that, “the face of the figure is a sort of self-portrait of Shahzia.”
Highlighting female power in a different way is “Infinite Woman” (2019-2021) in the main exhibition gallery on the second floor. It is a painting with watercolor, ink, gouache and gold leaf on paper. It shows a large sphere with a repeated set of colorful female bodies in profile circling the globe and resembling spikes. Inside the sphere are gold leaves and individual dark, flowing hairs, which represent gopis, female cowherds and devoted followers of Lord Krishna in Hinduism, as well as female energy and strength.
According to Alexander, the painting looks either “like a giant planet out in the universe or it looks like a virus or a cell form, and she’s kind of doing that deliberately.” The women “become this kind of armor on this planet … but they’re all connected and attached to it via their heads.” Sikander is quoted on the label: “I see universal movement inherent in women, through their fertility, fecundity, their essence of being.”
“Liquid Light II” is a colorful work made of painted, etched, and laminated glass. Sikander created this piece for the Venice Biennale, with the medium a nod to Venice’s history of glass-making. It shows two females facing each other with similar features as the “NOW” sculpture: tentacles attached to their feet and standing on a lotus base. The arms look like wings, and Alexander noted that it makes the women look like a “butterfly form.”
East and West
Sikander was working on a mural commission for a New York law firm in 2001; the piece depicted women and law through a non-Western lens. The painting, “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II,” shows part of this mural, which she discontinued after the 9/11 attacks. It portrays a brown female form with multiple arms wielding various weapons, a reference to the Hindu warrior goddess Durga, ready for battle. However, it was perceived as violent because of the sword-wielding figure.
On the label for the painting, Sikander reflects on the New York art scene before and after 9/11: from an integrated, global and inclusive art scene to a siloed art scene where artists were defined by their race, nationality and religion. Alexander commented that, “she was reduced to being seen as a threat as a brown person, as an immigrant, and as a Muslim,” but that the painting is “amazingly powerful in its unfinished state.”
Another artwork commenting on East/West differences is the 2020 sculpture “Promiscuous Intimacies.” It portrays, in patinated bronze, a Hindu goddess sitting on the shoulder of a Greco-Roman Venus, ”playing with traditional power hierarchies,” as the label notes. Alexander said, “their gaze never meets and their bodies are tangled together in this kind of power balance, but they never see eye to eye.”
A final set of artworks address colonialism. A 2011 painting titled “Walled States” depicts a map of the United States at the bottom with the lost city of Julfar at the top, a major Islamic-era port and trading center in what is now the United Arab Emirates. According to the label, the painting “shows the connections between the two countries via the trade, movement, and ecologically destructive qualities of petroleum.” Alexander noted that the painting can look “kind of abstract” but then it “becomes somewhat representational,” so Sikander’s commentary “can be rather subtle.”
Another painting, titled “Land of Tears”, created in 2021, shows one of Sikander’s signature motifs of an oil rig called a Christmas tree (because of the resemblance) that is used to extract oil across the Middle East. The blue “Christmas tree” is surrounded by numerous figures, including a female figure and skeleton lying in opposite directions and holding hands below the tree. The label states that “Sikander describes this work as visualizing the concept of eco-feminism. While oil is extractive, the feminine offers a counterbalance to the depletion of natural resources.”
A nearby large animation, “Parallax,” created in 2013, also shows oil extraction in the Middle East, using Sikander’s own hand drawings, making the animation beautiful, powerful, and dreamlike at the same time. “The images aren’t just digitally created, they are created by hand,” said Alexander. She also strongly encouraged people to see the exhibit in person, because “photographic reproduction doesn’t capture the way that they (her artworks) sparkle, the way that light catches them, and the different textures that are present in the work.”
In November 2025 at the Cantor Arts Center, Sikander gave the distinguished lecture in Asian Art in honor of the Lijin Collection. In the lecture, she talked about her art and process, her inspirations and collaborations. The lecture and subsequent roundtable discussion can be viewed on the Stanford Video channel on YouTube.
“Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior,” will be on view through Jan. 25 at the Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford. Admission is free. museum.stanford.edu.
