Baseera Khan is a New York-based performance, sculpture, and installation artist interested in materials, color, and their economies, the effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan's public art commission, "Painful Arc, Shoulder High," remains on The High Line Park, NYC located by the Standard Hotel until summer 2024. Khan mounted their first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2021-22), and mounted a solo touring exhibition for Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (2022-2023). They have exhibited in numerous locations such as the Wexner Center for the Arts (2021), New Orleans Museum of Art (2020), Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany, Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Sculpture Center, NY (2018), Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017). Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan completed a 6-week performance residency at The Kitchen NYC (2020) and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19), Abrons Art Center (2016-17), was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan won an Artist Prize for the MTV/Smithsonian Channel TV docu-series, called The Exhibit in 2022-23. Khan is also a recipient of the UOVO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, MN, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Khan received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).
“I make work to discuss materials and their economies, the effects of this relationship to labor and family structures, religion, or spirituality, to reveal the intersections of power and culture. In my opinion, material creates identity, not the other way around. The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try not to reinstate these colonial labels in my work, instead try to emancipate them by my use of form and color, performance - I abstract identity with multiple ways of working. My life's work is dedicated to the development of my own legacy, on my own terms, with the use of architecture, fashion, painting, photography, textiles, and music, parody, sculpture, and performance, I manifest my femme native-born Muslim American experience.”