Mumbai: Google is celebrating today 86th birthday of renowned Indian-American, AMU alumnus and one of the prominent faces of Minimalism Art Movement Zarina Hashmi by featuring her on Google Doodle.
The illustration on Google Doodle has been done by New York-based guest artist Tara Anand. The artwork captures Hashmi’s use of minimalist abstract and geometric shapes to explore concepts of home, displacement, borders, and memory.
Zarina Hashmi was born on July 16, 1937 in Aligarh. She and her four siblings lived an idyllic life until the partition of India in 1947. Zarina's family was forced to migrate to Karachi in Pakistan. Zarina's father, Sheikh Abdur Rashid, was a teacher at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) whereas her mother, Fahmida Begum, was a homemaker.
After forced to stay in a refugee camp in Karachi, Zarina eventually returned to Aligarh and earned a degree in Mathematics from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), but the place would never be home again, according to The New York Times.
At 21, Hashmi married Saad Hashmi, a young Foreign Service Diplomat, and began traveling the world. She spent time in Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became immersed in printmaking and art movements like modernism and abstraction.
When her husband died suddenly in 1977, she contemplated settling in India or Pakistan, where her parents then lived, but chose instead to move to New York City, which she had visited earlier. She found it difficult at first, living a bare-bones life alone in a small loft in the garment district.
In New York City, she became a strong advocate for women and artists of color. She soon joined the Heresies Collective, a feminist publication that explored the intersection of art, politics, and social justice. She then went on to teach at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which provided equal education opportunities for female artists.
Minimalism or minimalist art can be seen as extending the abstract idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of some other thing. Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic.
As part of the Minimalism Art movement, Hashmi became internationally known for her striking woodcuts and intaglio prints that combine semi-abstract images of houses and cities where she had lived. Her work often contained inscriptions in her native Urdu, and geometric elements inspired by Islamic art.
In 1980, she co-curated an exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery called “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States.” This groundbreaking exhibition showcased work from diverse artists and provided a space for female artists of color.
People all over the world continue to contemplate Hashmi's art in permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other distinguished galleries, according to NDTV.
Zarina Hashmi died in London as a result of complications from her Alzheimer's disease on April 25, 2020.
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