ONE
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, there is very little telling that this painting depicts a scene of a mass suicide. The 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 portrayed 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, many of her paintings work to reconstruct historical trajectories that remain invisible in mainstream accounts.
Inspired by Indian 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, markedly absent from established narratives—Sheikh’s Panghat Stories engages with one particular event recorded in Butalia’s book from the village of Thoa Khalsa, in which ninety Sikh women and children were said to have drowned themselves in the village well in a form of “honor killing” to avoid rape, abduction, or conversion during a siege on their village at the advent of Partition. Sheikh’s painting of this moment of history functions as an almost anti-historical painting, not asserting a definitive account but rather opening an inquiry, one that presents possibilities for retrospective agency as it challenges the certainty of the established narrative.
Butalia herself raises the question of how one can ever arrive at the "'truth' of these incidents," as there is no way to recover the voices of the [abducted or killed] women themselves. The accounts she recovered are almost all from surviving men of the village, with the exception of Basant Kaur [the singular surviving woman], whose voices "cannot unproblematically be taken to reflect what the women felt." Butalia remained certain that "the lines between choice and coercion must have been more blurred than the accounts reflect."
It is this absence in the narrative that Sheikh seeks to explore in 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 a half century as 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 Bengal School's 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's work continues to push 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: their sections, compartments, and borders [are] ways of opening up the painted world rather than paring it down.”
two
full text of an exhibition label written for Faith Ringgold's Under a Blood Red Sky #7 (2006) featured in the 2024 exhibition poetics of dissonance at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
Distinguished American artist, author, and activist Faith Ringgold’s "story quilts" interweave quilting, painting and storytelling into a medium of her own making, one deeply tied to her identity and ancestry as an African American woman born at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. 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. The series details 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.
THREE
excerpted text of an acquisition proposal written in 2023 for Gabriela Muñoz's Earth Tattoo (Uma y Dalila) (2021) for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024.
Gabriela Muñoz's work is deeply tied to her identity as a self-proclaimed fronteriza, rooting her exploration of "power, labor, and transnational feminisms" within the US and Mexico borderlands region, as per the artist's website. Her work Uma y Dalila (2021) from the "Earth Tattoo" series is an overlapping line work portrait of the artist and her infant daughter, drawn with the artist’s breastmilk and Mexican earth on handmade paper formed from saguaro and yucca. Munoz's chosen medium pays homage to domestic forms of labor that are often invisible, while also expanding the act of nursing into a wider metaphor for the work done by women nurturing their communities. The acquisition of this piece by Muñoz, who has been named a 2024 United States Artist Fellow and Latinx Artist Fellow, would not only add to the archive of Muñoz's work within our collection but highlight the artist's exhibition history at SMoCA (Divisions of Labor (2021), Roadside Attraction (2020)) as Muñoz's work continues to gain recognition beyond the Southwest.
FOUR
excerpted wall text prepared for my virtual exhibition Mother Ireland completed in March 2025.
Whether by the name Eiré, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Irish Madonna, or even Eurydice,
depictions of divine femininity at the height of the Celtic revival are inseparable from the politics that defined the turn of the century for Ireland. The symbolics of Mother Ireland were everywhere, as seen in John Hughes’s depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice, understood by friend and nationalist writer AE Russell to be Erin and her harp in the arms of a lamenting son. This interchangeability was common and deeply intentional, as the images were meant to politicize the masses and educate children, seen in Beatrice Elvery’s illustrations for Cuala Press books meant to revive knowledge of the Irish folk tales, where even the mythic Faery Harper of the Fianna becomes an incarnation of Ireland herself. The power of these images of Ireland personified is also unmistakably rooted in an Irish tradition of female worship going back to the Celts, one that continues as these nationalist depictions continue to hold meaning well beyond their era, with such notable examples as Lady Lavery as Kathleen Ni Houlihan remaining on the Irish banknote well into the 1970s.