Baseera Khan


Baseera Khan is an American visual artist who uses material, form, and color to express non-verbal concepts in sculpture, installation, painting, performance, and photography.
Khan uses they/them pronouns. Their work discusses the political circumstances of their identity as a queer Muslim and "as a feminist, and as a brown Indian-Afghani". They are based in New York City.

Early life and education

Khan was born in 1980 in Denton, Texas. They were raised in Denton by working class, Muslim parents who lived in near-isolation because of the threat of deportation. Their parents emigrated from Bangalore, India to the United States before they were born.
They received a B.F.A. in drawing/painting and sociology from the University of North Texas in 2005, and an M.F.A. from the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning in 2012. In 2014, they completed the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture program.

Career

Khan is a conceptual artist who uses a variety of mediums to "visualize patterns and repetitions of exile and kinship shaped by economic, social, and political changes in local and global environments, with special interests in decolonization processes".
In December 2016, Khan was listed by Artnet, the art market website, as one of "14 Emerging Women Artists to Watch for 2017".
Khan's first solo exhibition in New York was at the Participant Inc gallery space in 2017. The exhibition, titled "iamuslima", was named after the eponymous term that Khan had Nike stitch on a pair of sneakers as a way of protesting Nike Inc.'s refusal to allow the words "Islam" or "Muslim" on its customizable sneaker models.
In 2018, Khan was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Other residencies and fellowships include an artist residency at Abrons Arts Center, an International Travel Fellowship to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart and a Process Space artist residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Khan staged their first solo museum exhibition, "Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive," in 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Presented as part of the annual UOVO Prize for emerging Brooklyn-based artists, the exhibition explored themes of Muslim-American identity and the body as a place of shared history.
In 2022, Khan was commissioned to create a series of sculptures based on the form of a Corinthian column – albeit one that seems to have been toppled and wrapped in handmade silk rugs from Kashmir – for Meta’s Manhattan office complex in the historic James A. Farley Building.
In 2023, Khan was the winner of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a reality TV series that aired on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel. Following the series finale, Khan's final winning commission, The Liberator, was installed in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., from May to July 2023. The work, a mixed media figurative sculpture made from a 3D-printed model of the artist's body and plexiglass, was partly inspired by an 18th-century Buddhist statue, Naro Dakini, in the collection of the National Museum of Asian Art.

Exhibitions