Roots and Wings: How Shahzia Sikander Became an Artist

Growing up in a multigenerational, multicultural home in Lahore, Pakistan, where her family’s Muslim traditions are filled with food, rituals, and love, Shahzia is a tomboy who loves skateboarding, biking, swimming, and flying her kite. She also loves stories of all kinds and is always surrounded by books. At the Catholic school she attends, she studies Western literature, and at home, her father regales her and her siblings with fantastical tales from a Russian storybook on animals. Shahzia’s love for books leads to a fascination with illustrations, like the ones she sees in illuminated manuscripts and South Asian miniature portraits, and she discovers a talent for drawing. She soon realizes that making art is much like learning a new language—it requires practice and hard work, but it gives her a new tool to express herself. Through art, Shahzia is able to create the different worlds she reads about, using her imagination to take her beyond the walls of the home she grows up in.

Written by artist Shahzia Sikander herself and featuring a new painting created especially for the book alongside artwork from her private archive and MoMA’s collection, Shahzia: My Life as an Artist is a colorful introduction to a multicultural perspective that will inspire young readers to use art and imagination to explore new worlds. 

Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) is a Pakistani-born and internationally recognized artist whose pioneering practice takes Indo-Persian miniature painting as a point of departure. She challenges the strict formal tropes of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions by experimenting with scale and media, including animation, video, mural, and collaboration. She has a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is in the collections of major museums around the world. She lives in New York. Hanna Barczyk is a widely published illustrator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and dozens of other publications. She lives in New York and Toronto.