Sample #1
an excerpt from the introduction of my dissertation entitled Steps to the Water: tracing legacies colonial to contemporary in the work of Nilima Sheikh completed in May 2025.
Washes of misty yellows, deep oranges, and soft blues are set against an ascending procession of women, their translucent bodies delicate and fluid as they disrobe in sequence, the first of them poised at the edge of a well, unseeing. There is a strange otherworldliness to the scene to be sure, but upon first glance, one might be hard pressed to guess that this painting tells the tale of a mass suicide. This painting, Panghat Stories (2001), is one of many that has earned contemporary Indian artist Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945, Delhi, India) and her work the descriptor deceptively lyrical as her delicate figures and folktale motifs in vibrant washes of tempera often belie the trauma, tragedy, and violence at the heart of many of her chosen subjects. An artist eminently concerned with the social issues of her time, especially those facing women, her paintings situated in the past also work to represent historical trajectories that remain invisible in mainstream accounts.
Inspired by feminist historian Urvashi Butalia’s Other Side of Silence (1998)––a compilation of oral histories from the 1947 Partition of India that speak to the private pain and trauma of women’s experiences during that time, largely absent from established narratives––Sheikh’s Panghat Stories engages with one particular event included in Butalia’s book from the village of Thoa Khalsa, in whichninety Sikh women and children were said to have drowned themselves in the village well in a form of “honour killing” to avoid rape, abduction, or conversion during a siege on their village during the advent of Partition. Sheikh’s painting of the event functions almost as an anti-historical painting, not asserting a definitive account of the event but rather providing an inquiry, presenting possibilities for retrospective agency in questioning the certainty of the established narrative.
Butalia herself raises the question: How can we ever arrive at the ‘truth’ of these incidents? As with abducted women, there is no way in which we can easily recover the voices of women themselves. With the exception of Basant Kaur [the singular surviving woman], all the accounts I have quoted from above are by men, and clearly, we cannot unproblematically take their voices to reflect what the women felt. I think the lines between choice and coercion must have been more blurred than these accounts reflect.
It is this absence in the narrative that Sheikh seeks to explore in her Panghat Stories. As Sheikh herself characterizes, “I have tried to open up the questions which concern me, open up the history, open up the ways in which the past and the present are presented. I have tried to remodel even the stereotypes in the ways in which we look at and engage with” these histories. Beyond this feminist inquiry into the past, Sheikh’s unique visual lexicon, honed over the half century she has been a practicing artist, is another meeting point for a multitude of historical threads. Undergoing her arts education in Baroda in the sixties and early seventies, Sheikh found that the dominant modernist milieu, even within a school of painting
built on the revitalization of the folk-art tradition in India, left her little room within the “inherent pressure to engage with the political life of a nascent democracy” to negotiate her own search for “a feminine voice. Her rebellion, she terms, was “against the prevailing disabling stereotyping in which pre-nineteenth century painting was cast as decorative, ornamental, flat, precious, sentimental, feminine, and thus unsuitable for a modern India and its “proposed egalitarian values.” Sheikh pushes back against that narrative by situating the radical political within the lyrical and feminine language of her paintings. For Sheikh, “the additive structure of most miniature painting styles: theirnsections, compartments, and borders [are] ways of opening up the painted world rather than paring it down.”
Sample #2
full text of an exhibition label written for the 2024 exhibition poetics of dissonance at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
Distinguished artist and activist Faith Ringgold’s story quilts interweave quilting, painting, and
storytelling in artwork deeply tied to her identity and ancestry as an African American woman. Under a Blood Red Sky #7 is a later iteration of a scene taken from her story quilt series Coming to Jones Road (1999). Prompted by the racist hostility of her white neighbors after purchasing her home in New Jersey, Ringgold created the series detailing the imagined journey of her ancestors from bondage to freedom embodied in an escaped aunt’s house on Jones Road, paying homage to the historical pilgrimage as a means of personal healing. Her story quilts often incorporate written narration of the scene, and in this work, words line the border of the piece, describing her ancestors' departure from the cotton fields after dark as they journey north, bodies illuminated under bright swathes of red dusk.
Sample #3
excerpted wall text prepared for my virtual exhibition Mother Ireland completed in March 2025.
NATION
Whether by the name Eiré, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Irish Madonna, or even Eurydice,
depictions of divine femininity at the turn of the 20th century, and the height of the Celtic revival, are inseparable from the politics that define the era for Ireland. The symbolics of Mother Ireland were everywhere, even in John Hughes’s depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice, understood by friend AE Russell to be Erin and her harp in the arms of a lamenting son. In far more depictions, this interchangeability is deeply intentional. In books meant to revive knowledge of the Irish tradition through recording folk tales and cycles of mythology, even the Faery Harper of the Fianna becomes somehow an incarnation of Ireland herself in Beatrice Elvery’s accompanying illustrations. While depictions of Ireland personified vary from the Consoling Virgin to the old crone Kathleen Ni Houlihan, meant to politicize masses and educate children, the inheritance of the power of these nationalist images is unmistakably rooted in the Irish tradition of female worship going back to the Celts. These politicized depictions of the Celtic revival continue to hold meaning well beyond their era, evidenced by Lady Lavery as Kathleen Ni Houlihan remained on the Irish banknote until the 1970s and the recreations of the unsalvageable Kilmainham Gaol Madonna.
Sample #4
excerpted acquisition proposal written in 2023 as per the collections policy of the Scottsdale Museum of Art.
Gabriela Muñoz is an artist whose work is rooted in her experiences as a migrant living in Arizona,
including the more than a decade she spent in the state undocumented. Her practice has been concerned
with the shifting tides of social justice and racial equality, as well as the centralizing of borderland
narratives. A large part of her practice is archival, in the keeping and sharing of histories and stories of
individuals from communities that are marginalized and de-centered. Muñoz works to build
counternarratives to those told about women of color in particular, and the spaces they both inhabit and
nurture. Her work Earth Tattoo (Uma y Dalila) (2021) would expand on the narratives and perspectives
we have within SMoCA’s collection.