Intersection set

Deborah Sontag has an article about 'the intersection of Islam, America, and Identity' in The New York Times:

After a long courtship over the telephone, Asma Ahmed, a painter in Karachi, Pakistan, married her fiancé, Rafi-uddin Shikoh, a business consultant in New York, in a bicontinental wedding by webcam. When the new bride then moved to Queens in 2002, she tried to make herself at home by staking her claim through art. In Pakistan Ms. Ahmed Shikoh’s work had been sociopolitical, addressing what she saw as the country’s colonization by American fast-food chains, for instance, with paintings like The Invasion, in which swarms of Ronald McDonalds, wearing screaming-red clown wigs, surround a central monument in Karachi.
Here, however, her art turned deeply personal as she grappled with her new identity as an immigrant and, having rarely set foot in a mosque back home, as a gradually more observant Muslim. In her first American paintings Ms. Ahmed Shikoh reimagined the Statue of Liberty in her own image: in a Pakistani wedding dress, as a pregnant immigrant, and as a regal mother, baby on hip. Next she transformed the subway map with paint and calligraphic script into an Urdu manuscript that made the city feel more like hers.
Finally, in 2006, after she made the difficult decision to cover her hair, inspired by Muslim-American women who managed to combine faith and a career, Ms. Ahmed Shikoh began using the head scarf as a recurring image. On the surface, Ms. Ahmed Shikoh, now 31, has little in common with Negar Ahkami, 38, a sleek, raven-haired Iranian-American artist, beyond the wall space that they share in a new exhibition, The Seen and the Hidden: [Dis]Covering the Veil, at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Manhattan. Ms. Ahkami grew up in suburban New Jersey, considers herself only “technically Muslim” and toys with stereotypical images of exotic Middle Eastern women in her art.
Yet the two are both in their thirties, mothers of small children and emerging artists in the New York area. They are both exploring their identities as refracted through their backgrounds in the wake of 11 September. And they are both working to create a new kind of Islamic art that is modern, Westernized and female-centric. “As women artists of Muslim descent, Asma and Negar are both trying to discover who they are, to look at themselves and their heritage and to get beyond stereotypes,” said David Harper, a curator of the Austrian exhibition. “What’s so interesting is that they present two such very different ways to examine the subject from American soil.”
The Hidden and the Seen, which runs through 29 August, features fifteen artists, thirteen of them women, of whom Ms. Ahmed Shikoh and Ms Ahkami are the only full-time United States residents. The exhibition is a partner event of the Muslim Voices Festival organized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Asia Society, and New York University’s Center for Dialogues.
In this exhibition Ms. Ahmed Shikoh and Ms. Ahkami seek to humanize the individuals beneath the veil. Ms. Ahmed Shikoh’s approach is deeply earnest. Her installation, Beehive, is a cardboard honeycomb whose cells are stuffed with the colorful scarves that she collected from scores of Muslim-American women who also sent messages— “I ran the 10k Bolder Boulder and wore this scarf”— that annotate this intentionally rough-hewn work.
In contrast Ms. Ahkami’s piece is playful, acerbic, and polished. It consists of eight nesting dolls sumptuously repainted as Persian Dolls, in brilliant colors with gold faces. The outer doll is stern, with a thick unibrow, in full black chador. The ever smaller dolls within wear Chanel head scarves or cocktail dresses or, as with the tiniest, nothing at all but curves. “I have always struggled with the images of humorless, somber Iranian women in full-on black chador,” Ms. Ahkami said. “For me these images do not reflect the real Iranian women any more than the images of the harem girls of the 19th century did.”

Rico says there's more; click the post title to read it.