Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-American artist and printmaker known for her contributions to the minimalist style, celebrates her 86th birthday today with a Google Doodle.
Zarina, best known for her sculptures, prints, and drawings, embraced abstract and geometric forms within the context of the Minimalist movement, with the goal of eliciting a spiritual reaction in spectators.
Early Childhood
Zarina was born in the small Indian town of Aligarh in 1937 and lived a happy childhood with her four siblings until partition forced her family and millions of others to flee to Karachi in newly constituted Pakistan.
Zarina married a young diplomat at the age of 21 and began on a global voyage. Her travels took her to Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became acquainted with printmaking as well as the modernist and abstract art movements.
Zarina moved to New York City in 1977 and quickly became an outspoken advocate for women and female artists of colour. She became a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist periodical that examines the nexus of politics, art, and social justice.
Zarina later became a lecturer at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which provided female artists with equal educational chances.
She co-curated an exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in 1980 titled “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists from the United States.”
Art by Zarina Hashmi
Zarina rose to prominence for her beautiful intaglio and woodcut prints, which featured semi-abstract images of residences and locations in which she had lived.
Her status as an Indian lady born into a Muslim family, as well as her nomadic youth, impacted her painting. Notably, she included regular geometry aspects from Islamic religious decorations into her work.
Zarina’s early works, with their subdued and abstract geometric aesthetic, have been compared to the works of minimalists such as Sol LeWitt.
Her achievements
Her work continues to attract audiences across the world, and it is included in permanent collections at prestigious museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Zarina died on April 25, 2020, in London, as a result of Alzheimer’s disease complications. Her amazing artistic talents continue to carry on her legacy.