Anila Quayyum Agha (b. 1965, Lahore, Pakistan) works in a cross-disciplinary fashion with mixed media. She explores global politics, cultural multiplicity, and social and gender roles. As a result, her artwork is a conceptually challenging mixture of thought, artistic action and social experience. Since 2014 her work has been featured in more than fifteen solo museum exhibitions, including at the Seattle Asian Art Museum and Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas. Two large sculptural works were on view at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the U.K. in 2023.
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. Recent work includes resin paintings in which Agha radically expanded her use of color. She departed from her characteristic streamlined palettes in favor of vivid hues inspired by the high-contrast color combinations popular in South Asian and African textiles. Vivid color is also a centerpiece of her newest work, Cabinets of Curiosities. These paper collages bring together meticulously hand-cut images of flora and fauna, delicately embellished with stitching and beads and sealed within layers of clear resin.
After arriving in the United States 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, handsewn story quilts by African-American artist Faith Ringgold and 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. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Asia Society, New York; Seattle Asian Art Museum, Washington state; Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania; Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas; Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, among many others. Her work was included in the exhibition She Persists at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Major awards include the 2019 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2025, Agha was a Joan Mitchell Center artist in residence.
Anila Quayyum Agha lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
