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What is the controversy?
Two sculptures by internationally acclaimed Pakistan-born American artist Shahzia Sikander, Witness (2023) and Now (2023), were co-commissioned for temporary display by Madison Square Park Conservancy and University of Houston System Public Art Program to be displayed at the University of Houston after a 6-month running in Madison Square Park in 2023. Witness has been subject to controversy amid allegations from one of Texas’ largest anti-abortion lobbies asserting that the work enlists imagery that honors abortion and memorializes the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a self-described pro-life organisation, this group has been credited with the undoing of Roe v. Wade.
The sculpture, praised by critics during its display last year in New York City’s Madison Square Park, is an allegory of women and justice.
Shahzia Sikander
Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ‘Genius’ Award, Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others.
A survey exhibition, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behaviour presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Cincinnati Art Museum as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, will be opening on April 18, 2024.