Zarina (artist)

Zarina Hashmi (16 July 1937 – 25 April 2020), known professionally as Zarina, was an Indian American artist and printmaker based in New York City. Her work spans drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Associated with the minimalist movement, her work utilized abstract and geometric forms in order to evoke a spiritual reaction from the viewer.

Biography
Zarina Rashid was born on 16 July 1937 in Aligarh, India, to Sheikh Abdur Rashid, faculty at Aligarh Muslim University, and Fahmida Begum, a homemaker. Zarina earned a degree in mathematics, BS (Honours) from the Aligarh Muslim University in 1958. She then studied a variety of printmaking methods in Thailand, and at Atelier 17 studio in Paris, apprenticing to Stanley William Hayter, and with printmaker Tōshi Yoshida in Tokyo, Japan. She lived and worked in New York City.

During the 1980s, Zarina served as a board member of the New York Feminist Art Institute and an instructor of papermaking workshops at the affiliated Women's Center for Learning. While on the editorial board of the feminist art journal Heresies, she contributed to the "Third World Women" issue.

Zarina died in London from complications of Alzheimer's disease on 25 April 2020.

On 16 July 2023, a Google Doodle inspired by Zarina's works was published to commemorate what would have been her 86th birthday.

Artistry
Zarina's art was informed by her identity as a Muslim-born Indian woman, as well as a lifetime spent traveling from place to place. She used visual elements from Islamic religious decoration, especially the regular geometry commonly found in Islamic architecture. The abstract and spare geometric style of her early works has been compared to that of minimalists such as Sol LeWitt.

Zarina's work explored the concept of home as a fluid, abstract space that transcends physicality or location. Her work often featured symbols that call to mind such ideas as movement, diaspora, and exile. For example, her woodblock print Paper Like Skin depicts a thin black line meandering upward across a white background, dividing the page from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. The line possesses a cartographic quality that, in its winding and angular division of the page, suggests a border between two places, or perhaps a topographical chart of a journey that is yet unfinished. For her Delhi series, she created a woodcut print based on an engraving of the city of Shajahanabad as it stood before the siege of 1857.

Awards and fellowships

 * 2007: Residency, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia
 * 2006: Residency, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, California
 * 2002: Residency, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
 * 1994: Residency, Art-Omi, Omi, New York
 * 1991: Residency, Women's Studio Workshop, Rosendale, New York
 * 1990: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
 * 1989: Grand Prize, International Biennial of Prints, Bhopal, India
 * 1985: New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, New York
 * 1984: Printmaking Workshop Fellowship, New York
 * 1974: Japan Foundation Fellowship, Tokyo
 * 1969: President's Award for Printmaking, India

Selected exhibitions
Zarina was one of four artists/artist-groups to represent India in its first entry at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles organized the first retrospective of her work in 2012. Entitled Zarina: Paper Like Skin, the exhibition traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

During the 2017–18 academic year, Zarina was the Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. The residency culminated in a solo exhibition, Zarina: Dark Roads (6 October 2017 – 2 February 2018) and a publication, Directions to My House.

Examples of her work are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.