Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial and other underrepresented narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. This lively volume presents her powerful early work, created between 1987 and 2003, from South Asian, West Asian, and Western perspectives, illuminating new understandings for a wide audience. Charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, the book reclaims her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art, especially in Pakistan, international art discourse of the 1990s, and contemporary global practices and debates.

Growing up in a multigenerational, multicultural home in Lahore, Pakistan, where her family's Muslim traditions are filled with food, rituals, and love, Shahzia is a tomboy who loves skateboarding, biking, swimming, and flying her kite. She also loves stories of all kinds and is always surrounded by books. At the Catholic school she attends, she studies Western literature, and at home, her father regales her and her siblings with fantastical tales from a Russian storybook on animals. Shahzia's love for books leads to a fascination with illustrations, like the ones she sees in illuminated manuscripts and South Asian miniature portraits, and she discovers a talent for drawing. She soon realizes that making art is much like learning a new language--it requires practice and hard work, but it gives her a new tool to express herself. Through art, Shahzia is able to create the different worlds she reads about, using her imagination to take her beyond the walls of the home she grows up in. Written by artist Shahzia Sikander herself and featuring a new painting created especially for the book alongside artwork from her private archive and MoMA's collection, Shahzia: My Life as an Artist is a colorful introduction to a multicultural perspective that will inspire young readers to use art and imagination to explore new worlds.

Is it possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference? This question is the subject of an exhibition that brings together artists who come from the Islamic world. Tapping into certain aesthetic, political, and spiritual notions, this book seeks to highlight the nuanced reactions of each individual artist.

Catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition SHAHZIA SIKANDER: NEMESIS held at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, from January 24 - April 11, 2004; and at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, from September 19, 2004 - January 2, 2005.

Free of being prescribed while using a very prescribed and structured form. I like that tension. Miniature painting comes with a set of rules It's the materiality, the seductiveness of the surface, the investment, the submission, the hours that are put in In the end, they are very meditative and meaningful gestures, like ritual. In this sense, miniature painting is more about subverting modernity than subverting tradition. --Shahzia Sikander (from the interview with Bhabha)

""Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend," wrote author and artist Etel Adnan in a 1998 essay. Barton (American, 1928-1992) was born and raised in New York and settled in the Bay Area in the 1950s. Working primarily in pen or brush and ink, in a kaleidoscopic linear style, Barton ceaselessly recorded the world around him. His intricate sheets capture the intimate interiors and social spaces, lovers and friends, and architectural and botanical subjects that fascinated him. Bringing together more than sixty drawings, two accordion-folded sketchbooks, and printed books and portfolios, this catalogue presents the work of a significant and, until now, unheralded figure of the Beat era. Complementing the images are a deeply researched essay by Rachel Federman, curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, and an excerpt of Adnan's essay, the first and previously the only published account of Barton"--