CINCINNATI, OH.- The Cincinnati Art Museum announced the opening of Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior. Offering a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s career to date, the exhibition unites more than 70 artworks in multiple mediums made over the past 30+ years. The exhibition premiered to international acclaim as a Collateral Event during the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia—a globally significant platform for contemporary art—at the Palazzo Soranzo van Axel. CAM co-organized the Venice presentation with the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA).

The CAM exhibition is a career-spanning presentation that, rather than proceeding chronologically, follows Sikander’s primary ideas and inquiries throughout her work, rooted as they are in a recurring lexicon of forms, figures, and ideas. The exhibition, the largest and most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s career, explores Sikander’s role as an American artist, a Pakistani artist, a Muslim artist, a feminist artist, and—perhaps most significantly—a global citizen engaging with a disrupted historical narrative.

“Collective Behavior proposes kinship systems between experience, consciousness, race, and culture,” said Sikander. “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. Taking a global feminist perspective, I explore gender and body politics, examining the female form and feminine presence in art, religion, and society.”

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is curated by Ainsley M. Cameron, PhD, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

The exhibition is the latest of many collaborations—from commissions to exhibitions—between Cameron and Sikander. “It is an absolute pleasure to work with Shahzia on this exhibition. She has a boundless capacity for reinvention, which has repeatedly drawn me and many others to her work. She not only transformed South Asian painting histories by bringing this technique into dialogue with contemporary ideas and aesthetics, but she continues to iterate on these legacies and push her own practice in new directions, adding materials and mediums to her already expansive repertoire,” said Cameron. “Collective Behavior illustrates Shahzia’s artistic innovations and fully considers the multivalence of her practice.”

Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting central and South Asian manuscript painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander earned a BFA in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Sikander received her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Over the subsequent more than 20 years, Sikander’s practice—which has expanded to include paintings, media work, and most recently, sculpture—has been pivotal in showcasing art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition. Sikander has been the recipient of many notable awards, including most recently the Pollock Prize for Creativity in 2023, the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize in 2022, the Asia Society Award for Significant Contribution to Contemporary Art in 2015, a medal of Art by the US Department of State in 2012, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. Sikander serves on the boards of Art21, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is a member of the Asian American Arts Alliance’s artist council. In spring 2023, Sikander served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and in spring 2024 as an adjunct professor at Brown University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She is currently an adjunct professor for fall 2024 at Columbia University and the Alan Kanzer Artist in Residence at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute of Mind, Brain and Behavior.

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is on view in the Western & Southern galleries (232 and 233) from Friday, February 14 through Sunday, May 4, 2025.