Client: Midtown Park

Overview

The artist Shahzia Sikander designed this iconic public work specifically for Midtown Park in Houston, home to numerous major permanent art commissions. Midtown Park celebrates Houston’s authentic art scene and remarkable art community by establishing an arts ecosystem. It offers three acres of new public urban park and open space with complementary pedestrian-oriented streetscapes. It includes a great lawn, flexible pavilion, bayou and trail, native landscaping, interactive water feature, playground, game courts, market areas and a dog park. Mary-Am, a complex mosaic portrait, is a celebration of the subliminal feminine force present in nature and in all cultures and religions. The female face’s emergence from the water and from within the painterly marks and gestures, and the portrait’s upward glance, is symbolic of its soaring, inspiring premise, the human journey of creativity and strife. First photo credit: Gary Griffin

Goals

For Sikander, art is a deeply personal vehicle. She engages paradoxes and polarities, power and history through female accounts and narratives, whether in art-history, culture, religion or political discourse. Iconographies present in the artist's work counter narrow definitions of the “other” and provide a broader representation of women, whose voices she feels, are often missing or censored in our culture. By revisiting and reframing history, and offering counter perspectives, Sikander aims to address enduring biases and transform societal norms.

Process

The artist worked closely with our artisans in Munich to create a mosaic fountain for this new outdoor green space in the heart of Houston.

Additional Information

Shahzia Sikander was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan. She lives and works in New York. Other public Installations & commissions include: "Disruptions as Rapture", Public Installation, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada, "Ecstasy as Sublime", "Heart as Vector and Quintuplet-Effect", Permanent Campus Commission, Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building and & Louis A. Simpson International Building, Princeton University, NJ, "Gopi Contagion", Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment, Times Square, New York. Sikander received a number of awards, including the Shakir Ali Award/Kipling Award from the National College of Arts, Lahore in 1993, The Joan Mitchell Award in 1999, and the MacArthur Fellows Program in 2006. In 2012, Sikander received the inaugural Medal of Art from Hillary Clinton & the US State Department. Pioneer of 'Neo-Miniature, Sikander continues to impart her personal touch and political and social views into what may be considered to be an impersonal & disciplined tradition while opening up the discourse on craft & traditional art forms in nuanced ways. She continues to exhibit work all over the world, exploring tensions between power & powerlessness to engage with the intrinsically beautiful & poignant into culturally relevant & transformative. First photo credit: Gary Griffin