Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art to present joint Sikander exhibit

The Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art are partnering to present “Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior,” starting Feb. 14. 

This joint exhibition offers a thorough look at Sikander’s artistic career, featuring nearly 100 artworks in multiple mediums created over the past 35 years. The exhibition first showed during the 60th International Art Exhibition, a global platform for contemporary art at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel in Venice, Italy.

The Cincinnati Art Museum’s exhibition is a career-spanning presentation that explores Sikander’s main ideas and questions throughout her work, rather than following a chronological order. As the largest and most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s career, it delves into Sikander’s many identities – as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and a global citizen.

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s presentation focuses on Sikander’s art in relation to historic South Asian works from the museum’s collection that have inspired her. It builds on the rich histories in the CMA’s renowned South Asian collection and situates contemporary artistic practice in relation to the global history that came before it.

“Collective Behavior proposes kinship systems between experience, consciousness, race and culture,” said Sikander, who was born in Lahore, Pakistan.

Over her career, Sikander has become known for subverting central and South Asian manuscript painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Her practice, which has expanded to include paintings, media work, and most recently, sculpture over the past two decades, has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition.

“The works in this exhibition address many themes close to my heart, including centering women’s narratives among uneven power relations and ongoing legacies of colonialism,” she said. “Taking a global feminist perspective, I explore gender and body politics, examining the female form and feminine presence in art, religion, and society.”

No stranger to Sikander’s work

In Cincinnati, “Collective Behavior” is curated by Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The curator in Cleveland is Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition in Cincinnati will run through May 4, while the show in northeast Ohio will remain open through June 8.

This is the latest collaboration between Cameron and Sikander, who have worked together on many projects, from commissions to exhibitions.

As part of this exhibition, the Cincinnati Art Museum will host a series of related programming, including a members opening on Feb. 13 and the 10th annual Asian Art Lecture on April 27. Additional event details will be available on the museum’s website. 

“Collective Behavior” also features an illustrated catalogue, published by Monacelli, featuring scholarly and poetic responses to Sikander’s work. To accompany the publication, Artspace is releasing a limited-edition print of Sikander’s “Her-Vimana” to support the presentations of shows at both CAM and the CMA.

“(Shahzia) has a boundless capacity for reinvention, which has repeatedly drawn me and many others to her work,” Cameron said. “She not only transformed South Asian painting histories by bringing this technique into dialogue with contemporary ideas and aesthetics but also continues to iterate on these legacies and push her own practice in new directions, adding materials and mediums to her already expansive repertoire.”