Empire Follows Art: States of Agitation 11

2020

Empire Follows Art: States of Agitation 11, 2020. Shahzia Sikander (Pakistani-American, b. 1969). Color digital printing, watercolor and gouache on prepared wove paper; sheet: 40.6 x 30.5 cm (16 x 12 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund 2021.103 © Shahzia Sikander In this drawing, Pakistani-born artist Shazia Sikander innovatively combines the artistic traditions of her native country with expressionistic brushwork related to her Western training. Sikander studied miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and the influence of this work is visible in digitally printed images of her own creation depicting a figure and animals throughout this sheet. The artist painted over them with dense layers of watercolor, evoking the dualities and divisions of her own identity. Shazia Sikander has described the theme of the series to which this drawing belongs as “a state of struggle, of being caught variously between monetizing worlds, vocabularies, competing cultures and histories.”