Zarina (artist)

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Zarina Hashmi, born Zarina Rashid on July 16, 1937, in Aligarh, India, was an Indian American artist and printmaker who lived and worked in New York City. She made drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work is linked to minimalism and uses simple, geometric shapes to create a spiritual feel. She often drew on Islamic decorative ideas and explored themes of home, travel, and living between places.

She studied mathematics at Aligarh Muslim University, earning a BS (Honours) in 1958. She then learned various printmaking methods in Thailand, Paris (Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter), and Tokyo (with Tōshi Yoshida). In New York, she became a well-known artist and a voice for feminist and diaspora perspectives. In the 1980s, she served on the board of the New York Feminist Art Institute and taught papermaking at the Women’s Center for Learning. She also contributed to the feminist art magazine Heresies.

Zarina died on April 25, 2020, in London from complications of Alzheimer's disease. Her work is admired for its quiet power and sense of home as something that can move beyond place. In 2023, Google honored her with a doodle on what would have been her 86th birthday.

Key moments in her career include representing India at the Venice Biennale in 2011. The Hammer Museum held her first major retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, in 2012, which traveled to the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016, the Met hosted a program, Workshop and Legacy: Hayter, Krishna Reddy, Zarina Hashmi. She was Artist-in-Residence at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute in 2017–18, ending with the solo show Zarina: Dark Roads and a publication, Directions to My House.

Her work is in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Menil Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Notable pieces include Paper Like Skin, a woodblock with a single black line across a white page, suggesting borders and journeys, and her Delhi series based on Shahjahanabad before 1857.