Google Doodle Celebrates Indian-American Artist Zarina Hashmi's 86th Birth Anniversary

Google on Sunday paid tribute to Indian-American artist and printmaker Zarina Hashmi on her 86th birth anniversary with a doodle. The doodle which has been illustrated by New York-based guest artist Tara Anand, captures her use of minimalist abstract and geometric shapes to explore concepts of home, displacement, borders, and memory.

Notably, Hashmi is widely recognized as one of the most significant artists associated with the minimalist movement.

She was born on this day in 1937 in Aligarh. She and her four siblings lived an idyllic life until the partition of India in 1947. Zarina's family was forced to flee to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan.

Hashmi married a young foreign service diplomat and began traveling the world at 21. She spent time in Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became immersed in printmaking and art movements like modernism and abstraction.

Hashmi moved to New York City in 1977 and became a strong advocate for women and artists of color. She soon joined the Heresies Collective, a feminist publication that explored the intersection of art, politics, and social justice.

She then went on to teach at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which provided equal education opportunities for female artists. In 1980, she co-curated an exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery called “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States.” This groundbreaking exhibition showcased work from diverse artists and provided a space for female artists of color. 

A part of the Minimalism Art movement, Hashmi became internationally known for her striking woodcuts and intaglio prints that combine semi-abstract images of houses and cities where she had lived. Her work often contained inscriptions in her native Urdu, and geometric elements inspired by Islamic art. 

People all over the world continue to contemplate Hashmi's art in permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other distinguished galleries. 

She passed away in London as a result of complications from her Alzheimer's disease on April 25, 2020.