Bio

Anila Quayyum Agha (b. Lahore, Pakistan) received her BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore and an MFA from the University of North Texas. Recent solo shows include the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain, The Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL, Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, North Carolina Art Museum in Raleigh, and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. For the 2019 Venice Biennale, Agha was included in a collateral event, She Persists, with 22 contemporary feminist artists. Agha has received the Efroymson Art Fellowship, Cincinnati Art Museum’s 2017 Schiele Prize, the DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors award in 2018 & 2019. Agha’s 2014 ArtPrize entry, titled "Intersections", earned the Public Vote Grand Prize and split the Juried Grand Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the recipient of numerous grants from Indiana University like the New Frontiers Exploratory grant. For her creative research, Agha, was awarded the highest research honor by Indiana University in 2016 titled Glenn W. Irwin Research Scholar Award. Recently, Agha received an Endowed Chair position titled Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta University in Georgia, as well as the prestigious Smithsonian Fellowship in the arts for 2021 and will be working with both SAAM and AAA in Washington DC in 2021. Her work has been collected by both institutions and private collectors; nationally and internationally.

Agha works in a cross disciplinary fashion with mixed media; creating artwork that explores global and environmental politics, cultural multiplicity, and social and gender roles in our current cultural and global scenario. As a result, her artwork is conceptually challenging, producing complicated weaves of thought, artistic action, and social experience.

Statement

Starting with familiar Islamic motifs that are re-interpreted from their origins, my large-scale sculptural installations create universally welcoming environments through the interplay of light/shadow while the embroidered works on paper create intimacy and the presence of the feminine. Conceptually, using my own experiences as a woman of color, my artwork reaches beyond the personal to explore cultural binaries such as masculine-feminine, public-private, definite-amorphous, and religious-secular. Growing-up in a Muslim country led to many early experiences of exclusion due to my gender. Subsequently, being an immigrant in an alien culture has its own challenges. Despite power inequities, home is a familiar place, and the feelings of inclusivity-intimacy is what I have sought to recreate in my artwork.

My sculptural practice was initially inspired by a visit to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. There, I experienced a space that had inherent contradictions i.e., similarities/differences like in both Pakistan and the United States, yet I had freedom to experience the place without bias. The complex was both alien - built by the Moors, but also uncannily familiar. It became my goal to recreate that wondrous experience through my art.

The resulting sculptures are steel, cut with delicate lace-like patterns that reflect and refract light. Integrating light and shadows with solid forms, my installations aspire simultaneously to be perceptually soothing and conceptually challenging. The shadows, cast in all directions by the light spilling through the sculpture’s cutout surfaces, work magically, creating a dynamic transformation of the space in tandem with the itinerant movement of the audience. The sculptures transform white-cube spaces, allowing viewers to bask in universal splendor that belongs to all who experience them. In such a space, it becomes possible to explore the powerful dialogue of shared experience that transcends the barriers that exist due to gender, color, race, religion, and culture.