Shahzia Sikander’s NOW, 2023 is a large-scale outdoor sculpture on long-term display.
A significant addition to NMOA, NOW coincides with the debut of recent acquisitions and new surprises in the Arts of Global Asia galleries. NOW is an important contribution to the Museum’s campus-wide plan and outdoor sculpture park vision.
A luminous artwork made of bronze and measuring eight feet high, the female figure represented in NOW nods to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (with an incised lace collar around the figure’s neck). Fittingly, NOW will stand just feet away from the newly named Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall at Rutgers University, Newark, where Ginsburg was a law professor and whose commitment to social justice was an inspiration to Sikander.
NOW bears a historical connection to a painting Sikander created from 2000-2001, A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation 2, an unfinished work originally conceived as part of an expansive mural at Skadden Arps Law firm in NYC. The painted image re-envisioned the ubiquitous depiction of women and jurisprudence within the context of Western art history, refracted through a non-Western art history lens. More than two decades later, Sikander revisited the original painting as a conceptual springboard for the creation of NOW.
