Abstract
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with Muslim visual artists in New York City. It assumes that art is a particular medium or media form that not only gives us insight into the processes of creative expression, but helps us understand the relationship between global media events and their localized practices. For Muslim visual artists, and Muslims in general, “9/11” has become a significant marker of time in thinking about issues of identity, belonging and representation. Even in the art worlds, the larger tropes of Islam/Muslims—terrorism, violence, veiling, patriarchy, the Middle East—become the normative frames and images within and against which Muslim artists do their work. I outline the ways Muslim artists as cultural producers are not only contesting art world boundaries in terms of new and emerging forms of identification, but also the various sites where they are being forged. Muslim artists explore new ways of thinking about being Muslim, not necessarily as a theological or aesthetic unity, but as a minority identification in the West/America. I focus on the work of two artists, Nigerian-born Fatimah Tuggar and Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander.
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Notes
Throughout my work, I use the artists’ real names since they are public figures and some even “celebrities” in the New York art worlds. The artists and their works are already found in many art and other publications and I see my own research as one more writing on their lives and works. In addition, since many of us have become friends, through the course of my research, the first name usage seems appropriate.
I borrow and extend this expression from the title of chapter two in Geertz’s (1985) Local Knowledge, “Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination.”
Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and one of the leading scholars of Islam in the United States.
Michael Kimmelman, “Shahzia Sikander, Brent Sikkema,” The New York Times (New York), 7 February 2003, Sec. D: Fine Arts, 12.
Laura Auricchio, Time Out New York, 23–30 January 2003.
O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2001.
After her initial training at the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore, almost all of Shahzia’s schooling and professional life has been in the United States, first in Houston and then New York City, as well as Providence, where she graduated with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995.
Shahzia’s work, Reinventing the Dislocation 1997, was selected as part of American Visionaries 2001 publication. It was also this same work that made the cover of one of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet volumes, Alternative Modernities (2001), in which there are excerpts of Shahzia Sikander’s interview with Homi Bhabha. The interview was first published in the catalogue accompanying Shahzia’s exhibit at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
American Visionaries, The Whitney Museum of American Art Publications, (New York, 2001), 154.
David Hunt, Bomb, summer 2001, 46.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues in the Muslims in New York City Project at Columbia University (2004) and especially Professor Lila Abu-Lughod for overseeing this research. Many thanks to the Ford Foundation for its generous funding that made this research possible. Thanks also to the colleagues in this volume, for the discussions and suggestions during and subsequent to our Muslims and Media workshop at Princeton University, May 2008.
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Jiwa, M. Imaging, imagining and representation: Muslim visual artists in NYC. Cont Islam 4, 77–90 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-009-0102-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-009-0102-2