In Houston, Sikander was deeply involved in Project Row Houses, a housing and arts organization in the Third Ward, a predominantly African American neighborhood. This painting celebrates the organization with an upside-down portrait of its cofounder, the artist Rick Lowe, surrounded by various recontextualized images and icons. Sikander explains, “I wanted to counter derogatory representations of blackness in the medieval West—as seen in the silhouetted figures above the shields—through my construction of the armorial seal with the row houses. I also wanted to address politicized contemporary representations of the veil, and to reclaim positive representation for both. I am reimagining these entrenched and contested historical symbols by bringing them into conversation with overlapping diasporas.”
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969)
Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, 1989–97
Watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper
Collection of Carol and Arthur Goldberg
© Shahzia Sikander. Courtesy: the artist, Sean Kelly, New York and Pilar Corrias, London.
Shazia Sikandar: Critical thinking, creativity, collaboration are three tenets on which I've built my entire understanding of being an artist. How culture, society, and economy intersect and how communities coalesce plays a role in how art functions in overlapping spaces. I moved to Houston in 1995 and my sense of community was being determined through my expanding experience of different cultures, different histories. And Houston had a small South Asian population also, so I made a lot of efforts to engage with the local Indians and Pakistanis, some students, some aspiring writers, but also started to bring them into the Third Ward of the African-American neighborhood where I was involved with the Project Row Houses. And I was aware of my role as a bridge between communities of color that would not otherwise interact. So this work is really about that time, about that moment. For me, engaging with artists and projects at the Third Ward was really instrumental in my understanding of the broader grasp of intersections of community and art. Project Row Houses, which is featured in both these works, was a shining example of the local community and collectives operating outside of the traditional spaces of power and narrative, where the local and everyday function at sites of transformation, where women, students, Third Ward residents, artists of color, thinkers, poets, musicians, social activists, everybody would come about and engage. This painting for me is really that reflection, a reflection upon race, gender, class, different languages as a means of contact, where I was actively seeking overlapping diasporas in the American landscape of racial differences.