Zarina Hashmi

Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020) was an Indian-born, American artist. Born in Aligarh, British India, she received a mathematics degree from the Aligarh Muslim University in 1958. She then went on to study a variety of printmaking methods in Thailand; the Atélier 17 studio in Paris, where she was apprenticed to Stanley William Hayter; and with the printmaker Toshi Yoshido in Tokyo. 

Her work encompasses a range of artistic practices including drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Informed by her identity as an Muslim-Indian woman and extensive travel experiences Hashmi’s art explores the idea of home, distances, and trajectories. She drew elements from Islamic religious decoration, particularly the geometric shapes found in Islamic architecture. The abstraction and geometric style of her early works have been compared to minimalists such as Sol LeWitt. 

During the 1980s, Hashmi was an active board member of the New York Feminist Art Institute as well as an instructor of papermaking workshops at the affiliated Women’s Center for Learning. Also, on the editorial board of the feminist art journal Heresies, she contributed to the publication’s issue, titled ‘Third World Women’. 

Several pieces of her work are in the permanent art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In 2011, Hashmi was one of four artists/artist-groups who represented India in its first entry at the Venice Biennale. 

During her career, Hashmi’s held more than 40 solo exhibitions both in India and internationally. The first retrospective of her work was exhibited at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2012. It was entitled ‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin,’ and travelled to the Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has also been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunika Art Gallery, New Delhi; CSMVS Museum, Bombay; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; and Gallery Lux, San Francisco. She passed away in London in 2020.