Google is celebrating the 86th birth anniversary of Zarina Hashmi today. Zarina was born on July 16, 1937, in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. Before the partition, she lived in India with her four siblings. However, after India’s partition in 1947, Zarina had to move to Karachi, Pakistan, along with her family.
If you happened to see today’s Google Doodle, you would have come across a beautiful graphic of a woman. After seeing it, you might have become curious about who this woman is. Her name is Zarina Hashmi, and Google is celebrating her 86th birth anniversary today. Zarina was born on July 16, 1937, in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Before the partition, Zarina lived in India with her four siblings. However, after the country’s division in 1947, she had to move to Karachi, Pakistan, with her family. At the young age of 21, she got married to a young politician. Immediately after her marriage, she had the opportunity to travel the world. Her journeys took her to Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became familiar with printmaking, modernist, and abstract art forms.
In 1977, Zarina moved to New York City. There, she actively participated in the feminist movement and gradually became a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist magazine that explored the intersections of politics, art, and social justice.
Within a short period, Zarina became a professor at the Feminist Art Institute in New York. As a professor, she advocated for equal opportunities for women artists and supported their education. In the 1980s, she co-curated an exhibition titled “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” at the All India Radio Gallery.
Zarina Hashmi gained international recognition for her captivating woodcuts and intaglio prints, which often depicted the half-remembered images of the homes and cities where she had lived. Her works frequently incorporated her original Urdu script and geometric elements inspired by Islamic art.
People from all around the world continue to contemplate Hashmi’s art in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
