Who was Zarina Hashmi? How Google paid homage to Indo-American artist with a doodle

New Delhi: The 86th birthday of Indian-American artist and printmaker Zarina Hashmi is being commemorated by Google Doodle today. Among minimalist artists, she is largely considered to be among the most influential. This doodle was created in honour of Zarina by New York-based guest artist Tara Anand, whose works employ geometric and minimalist abstract forms to explore themes of home, displacement, and boundaries.

About Zarina Hashmi

Zarina Hashmi was born in undivided India in Aligarh in 1937; there she and her four siblings had a happy life until the partition of India in 1947. Zarina, her family, and many others were uprooted by the tragedy and had to go to Karachi in the newly divided Pakistan.

Zarina was only 21 years old when she married a young diplomat and set out on a global tour with her husband. After finishing her degree in mathematics, she travelled to Bangkok and Tokyo to learn woodblock printing and then to Paris to study intaglio with artist S. W. Hayter at Atelier-17. There she was introduced to printing and contemporary and abstract art.

In 1977, after moving to New York, Zarina quickly established herself as a leader in the movement to support women and artistic people. Later, she became a part of the Heresies Collective, a feminist publication that published articles on the intersection of art, politics, and social justice.

Zarina started working as a professor at the New York Feminist Art Institute to promote gender equality in the arts community and help female artists to get more opportunities. For the 1980 A.I.R. Gallery exhibition, she was a co-curator. In this exhibition, women artists from underrepresented communities were able to share their unique creative viewpoints with the world.

The semi-abstract imagery of homes and towns which Zarina represented in her woodcuts and intaglio prints became popular across the world. Her use of geometry and her focus on structural purity are both indications of an early fascination with architecture and mathematics. She often included Islamic-inspired geometric patterns and Urdu inscriptions in her work. Her artwork vividly documents the themes of home, displacement, borders, journey, and memory.

Her works are on display in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many more prestigious museums and galleries around the world, where they continue to captivate audiences. Zarina attended the 2011 Venice Biennale as the Indian representative. Zarina: Paper Like Skin, her reflective exhibition, debuted at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2012, before making its way to the Guggenheim in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

Zarina died in London on April 25, 2020, from Alzheimer’s complications.