On October 1, the Department of History of Art welcomed acclaimed Indian artist Nilima Sheikh to the Michigan Union for “Picturing the Other,” a public conversation with Rattanamol Singh Johal, Shireen and Afzal Ahmad Professor of South Asian Arts and Assistant Professor of History of Art. The event drew nearly 100 members from across U-M's campus community and closed with an audience Q&A and a reception.
For more than five decades, Sheikh has made paintings that address displacement, loss, longing, and violence, alongside the perception of tradition and ideas of femininity. Born in New Delhi and based for most of her life in Vadodara (Baroda), where she studied and was mentored by the artist K.G. Subramanyan, she has drawn on Indian and Persian miniature painting, textile and craft traditions, and poetry to develop a visual language for histories that Indian modernism often left unspoken, including Partition and communal violence.
Sheikh’s visit came just days after the opening of Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her first solo exhibition in the city. Organized by Roobina Karode of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and MoMA associate curator Cara Manes, the show presents large hanging scroll paintings from the Kashmir series along with “Shahid/Witness,” a new suite of ten panels shown for the first time. The New York Times praised the exhibition as an exquisite debut. The review singled out how Sheikh renders both the beauty of Kashmir and the violence that has marked it with the same delicacy and tenderness, in a style rooted in Indian and Persian miniature painting. Fractured Skies is on view through June 13, 2027.
U-M's event was made possible by the Shireen and Afzal Ahmad South Asian Arts Programming Fund.
