Priya Aditi
Google Doodle celebrates Zarina Hashmi: Zarina Hashmi, an Indian-American printmaker and artist, was widely recognised for her association with the minimalist movement. Hashmi was born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, on 16 July 1937, which Google decided to recognise with a doodle for the day.
On the artist’s 86th birthday on Sunday, the technology behemoth honoured her legacy with a brief note describing her life, works, and contributions to the feminist movement.
Hashmi’s use of abstract and geometric shapes in her artwork to investigate concepts of home, displacement, borders, and memory earned her recognition. “During the partition in 1947, Zarina’s family was uprooted and forced to flee to Karachi, Pakistan,” Google stated.
1977: Moved to New York
She married a young diplomat in the foreign service at age 21 and spent time in Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became profoundly involved in printmaking and artistic movements such as modernism and abstraction. “In 1977, Hashmi relocated to New York City, where she became an outspoken advocate for women and artists of colour,” the tech behemoth added. In addition, she had the opportunity to join the ‘Heresies Collective,’ a feminist publication that investigated topics through the lenses of art, politics, and social justice.
She later taught at the New York Feminist Art Institute as well. Hashmi co-curated an exhibition entitled Dialectics of Isolation: Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States at A.I.R. Gallery in 1980, which is among her most notable works. This innovative exhibition featured the work of a variety of artists and provided a platform for women of colour.
Hashmi is renowned for her woodcuts and intaglio prints, which combine semi-abstract images of the homes and cities in which she has resided. She passed away in 2020, leaving behind a significant legacy that the world continues to admire and contemplate.
Also read this:Google Doodle celebrates popular South Asian street food ‘pani puri’
Doodles are transient modifications of the Google logo on the homepages of Google’s websites that commemorate significant events and notable public figures.
