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Biography

Anila Quayyum Agha (b. 1965, Lahore, Pakistan) is a Pakistani-American artist who works in a cross-disciplinary fashion with mixed media. She explores global politics, cultural multiplicity, mass media, and social and gender roles. As a result, her artwork is a conceptually challenging mixture of thought, artistic action and social experience. Since 2019 her work has been featured in thirteen solo museum exhibitions. Her work was most recently on view in the group exhibition Reorientations: Europe and the Islamic Arts, 1851 to the Present at Kunsthaus Zurich. She currently has two sculptural works on view through September 17, 2023, at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the U.K. 

 

Agha is internationally recognized for her large-scale cube installations that use light and pattern to immerse viewers in shared experiences and inclusive spaces. The patterns Agha laser cuts into the lacquered-steel cubes are a reinterpretation of floral and geometric motifs found in Islamic art and architecture in Asia and Africa. Suspended and lit from within, the cubes cast elaborate floor-to-ceiling shadows that transform the surrounding environment, alluding to the richly ornamented public spaces such as mosques that Agha was excluded from as a female growing up in Lahore.

 

In addition to her suspended installations, Agha creates wall-mounted two-dimensional works that play with light, shadow and pattern. Work in her Flowers series (2018) is composed of elaborately laser-cut encaustic paper adorned with light-reflecting embroidery and beads. These exquisitely detailed drawings are framed within shadow boxes, allowing light to pass through the intricate designs to cast patterned shadows on the walls. More recent work includes resin paintings in which Agha radically expands her use of color and explores pattern in new ways. She departs from her characteristic streamlined palettes in favor of vivid hues inspired by the high-contrast color combinations popular in South Asian and African textiles. 
 

After arriving in the U.S. from Pakistan in 2000, Agha attended graduate school to study fiber arts. Over time, she expanded her practice to include other mediums as her work became increasingly sculptural. While still a student, Agha was frequently told that as a woman, particularly a woman of color and an immigrant, she would never advance her career if she used techniques associated with craft or visual elements unique to Islamic culture. But after seeing exhibitions of the subversive embroidered paintings of Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, the handsewn story quilts by African American artist Faith Ringgold and the multimedia installations created using textile techniques by American artists Anne Wilson and Ann Hamilton, Agha knew there was space for the kind of art she wanted to make, which was authentic to her life experiences while also conveying universal truths.
 

Anila Quayyum Agha received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and an MFA from the University of North Texas. She resides in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Augusta, Georgia, where she is a professor and the Eminent Morris Scholar of Fine Art at Augusta University. 

 

Agha’s work has been exhibited at Asia Society, New York; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; National Sculpture Museum, Valladolid, Spain; Chimei Museum of Art, Tainan City, Taiwan; Dallas Contemporary art museum, Texas; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; the University of New México Art Museum, Albuquerque; Jule Collins Smith Museum, Auburn, Alabama; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida, among many others. 
 

Major awards include the 2019 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the 2021 SARF (Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship). In 2019, Agha’s work was included in She Persists at the Venice Biennale. 

 

Lives and works in Augusta, Georgia, and Indianapolis, Indiana.


 

London
Museum Exhibition
London
Two sculptural works by gallery artist Anila Agha on view in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Through September 17, 2023

View immersive work by ward-winning gallery artist Anila Agha at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art: All the Flowers Are for Me, a lazer-cut steel cube that casts elaborate botanical shadows, and Stolen Moment Bouquet I & II, a wall-mounted botanical sculptural.

 

Click here for info.

Columbia, South Carolina
Museum Exhibition
Columbia, South Carolina
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: LET A MILLION FLOWERS BLOOM AT THE COLUMBIA MUSEUM OF ART

February 19 to May 29, 2022. Click here for info.

Albuquerque, New Mexico
Museum Exhibition
Albuquerque, New Mexico
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: MYSTERIOUS INNER WORLDS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO ART MUSEUM

February 18 to July 2, 2022. Click here for info. (Photo by Stefan Jennings Batista courtesy of the University of New Mexico Art Museum.)

Auburn, Alabama
Museum Exhibition
Auburn, Alabama
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: THE WEIGHT OF BLACK AT THE JULE COLLINS SMITH MUSEUM OF FINE ART

October 8, 2021 to January 2, 2022. Click here for info.

Fort Worth, Texas
Museum Exhibition
Fort Worth, Texas
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: A BEAUTIFUL DESPAIR AT THE AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

September 25, 2021–January 9, 2022. Click here for info.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Exhibition
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA’S WORK ON VIEW IN LIGHT UPON LIGHT: LIGHT ART SINCE THE 1960s

Anila Quayyum Agha’s Hidden Diamond–Saffron (2019) is on view alongside work by Lucio Fontana, Urs Fischer, James Turrell, Ahmed Mater and Yayoi Kusama. The exhibition of 30 light works and new commissions is curated by Susan Davidson, former senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. On view through June 12, 2021. Click here for more info.

Cinncinnati, Ohio
Museum Exhibition
Cinncinnati, Ohio
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: ALL THE FLOWERS ARE FOR ME AT THE CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM

December 5, 2020 to May 30, 2021. Click here for info. 

Burlington, Vermont
Museum Exhibition
Burlington, Vermont
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA‘S WORK ON VIEW IN TRANSCENDENT: SPIRITUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY ART AT BCA

October 18, 2019 to February 8, 2020. Click here for more info. (Photo by Sam Simon courtesy of BCA.)

Tulsa, Oklahoma
Museum Exhibition
Tulsa, Oklahoma
SHADOW OF TIME: ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA AT THE PHILBROOK MUSEUM OF ART

November 10, 2019 to February 16, 2020. Click here for info. 

Toledo, Ohio
Museum Exhibition
Toledo, Ohio
ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA: BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADOW AT THE TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART

October 9 2019 to February 9 2019. Click here for info.

Jacksonville, Florida
Museum Exhibition
Jacksonville, Florida
PROJECT ATRIUM: ANILA QUAYYUM AGHA

March 10, 2018 to June 24, 2018. Click here for info. (Photo by Doug Eng.)

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