Zarina Hashmi acquired a B.Sc. (Honours) Degree from Aligarh Muslim University in 1958. She further went on to study printmaking with S. W. Hayter at the Atelier, Paris between 1963- 67 and wood block printing at Toshi Yoshido Studio, Tokyo in 1974. Her exhibition in New York a few decades back was particularly well received.
She has been awarded residencies at Art-Omi in Omi, New York, and at the Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, New York. In 1985 and in 1990, Hashmi was awarded the N. Y. F. A. Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books. She has taught at Bennington College, Cornell University and University of California at Santa Cruz. Her work is represented in collections like the Museum of Modern Art, Victoria Albert Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
She has had several solo shows which includes the retrospective, Counting 1977-2005, with Bose Pacia, New York (2005), Cities, Countries and Borders, Chemould Gallery, Mumbai, India; Chawkandi Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan (2004), Maps, Homes, and Itineraries, Gallery Lux, San Francisco California (2003), Home is a Foreign Place, Korn Gallery Drew University, Madison, New Jersey (2002), Chawkandi Gallery Karachi, Pakistan (2000), Homes I Made, Faculty Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz (1994), House with Four Walls, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York (1992) among several others. She has also had several group exhibitions which include Fresh Talk Revisited: New York Artists from Fresh Talk / Daring Gaze, Asian/ Pacific/ American Studies Gallery, New York University, New York (2003), From the Two Pens / Line and Color in Islamic Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA (2002), In Conversation, Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India (2001), among several others. She has several received several award in the course of her practice, like the Presidents Award for Printmaking, India (1969), Japan Foundation Fellowship (1974), Residency Award at the Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, New York (1991), the Residency award at the Art-Omi, Omi, New York (1994), amongst others.
Working extensively in the abstract, minimalist idiom, Hashmi constructs symbolic maps that chart journeys and dis/locations, both physical and metaphoric, inscribing memories and experiences through the geometry of borders and ‘Shadowlines’. The Atlas of My World (2001), for instance, is a woodcut, which represents not just borders on a map but the barriers one crosses in life. “I started with the border that has most affected my life – the border between India and Pakistan. I decided to make an atlas from existing maps and draw the borders that I have crossed from country to country.” The House with Four Walls is a portfolio of prints, through which the artist has revisited her childhood in Aligarh. The last series in this set is, The Home is a Foreign Place. While her works are rooted in this milieu, they have progressed to considerations beyond personal nostalgia and memory. The Images of Delhi (2000) comprised of three layouts: one recalls Lutyens’ Delhi featuring the Chandni Chowk, another, the walled city of Shajahanabad and the third is just a wavy line.The complex layered history of these three Delhi’s is evoked through a cluster of intersecting roadways, illustrating how the synergy of an accumulated culture vitalizes Delhi today. Her retrospective, Silent Soliloquy (2006), Singapore, brought together a large body of lithographs, woodcuts, threadworks, pin drawings and etchings on paper, made in the 1970’s. Weaving Memory, Bodhi Art, Mumbai (2007) draws upon the poetics of space and the politics of cultural migration to inscribe her memories of the people, places and things she has encountered.
The artist lives and works in New York.