Shahzia Sikander’s NOW, 2023 is a large-scale outdoor sculpture on long-term display.
A significant addition to NMOA, NOW coincides with the debut of recent acquisitions and new surprises in the Arts of Global Asia galleries. NOW is an important contribution to the Museum’s campus-wide plan and outdoor sculpture park vision.
A luminous artwork made of bronze and measuring eight feet high, the female figure represented in NOW nods to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (with an incised lace collar around the figure’s neck). Fittingly, NOW will stand just feet away from the newly named Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall at Rutgers University, Newark, where Ginsburg was a law professor and whose commitment to social justice was an inspiration to Sikander.
NOW bears a historical connection to a painting Sikander created from 2000-2001, A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation 2, an unfinished work originally conceived as part of an expansive mural at Skadden Arps Law firm in NYC. The painted image re-envisioned the ubiquitous depiction of women and jurisprudence within the context of Western art history, refracted through a non-Western art history lens. More than two decades later, Sikander revisited the original painting as a conceptual springboard for the creation of NOW.
This momentous addition to our renowned Arts of Global Asia collection and its prominent placement signals to each passerby that the Museum is a place for everyone, both outside and in, where representation and diversity matters, and all are welcome.Linda C. Harrison, Director and CEO, The Newark Museum of Art
About the Artist
Shahzia Sikander is an internationally exhibiting artist who is 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 B.F.A. in 1991 from the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Sikander’s breakthrough work, The Scroll, 1989–90, received national critical acclaim in Pakistan and brought international recognition to this medium within contemporary art practices in the 1990s. Sikander received her M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Over the subsequent twenty-plus years, Sikander’s practice, which has expanded to include paintings, media work, and most recently, sculpture, has been pivotal in showcasing the art of the South Asian diaspora as a contemporary American tradition.
