Google Doodle Honours 86th Birth Anniversary of Artist Zarina Hashmi

Digital Desk: On the 86th anniversary of Zarina Hashmi's birth, Google created a beautiful doodle in her honour. She is well known for being among the most important painters connected to the minimalist movement.

Tara Anand, a visiting artist from New York, created today's illustration. The piece of art exemplifies Hashmi's use of geometric and abstract minimalism to investigate ideas of place, borders, and memory.

Hashmi was born in Aligarh on this day in 1937. She and her four siblings had a happy childhood till India was partitioned in 1947. Zarina's family was compelled to escape to Karachi, Pakistan's newly founded capital city.

Hashmi started traversing the world at the age of 21 after getting married to a young diplomat in the diplomatic service. She travelled to Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she was exposed to printmaking and modernist and abstract art trends.

After relocating to New York City in 1977, she grew to be a fervent supporter of female artists and people of colour. She quickly became a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist journal that investigated the nexus between politics, art, and social justice.

She then became a professor at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which offered female artists equal educational chances. She collaborated in the exhibition's co-curation in 1980 at AIR Gallery, "Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States."

Hashmi eventually rose to prominence internationally for her arresting intaglio and woodcut prints that blend semi-abstract representations of the homes and cities she had lived in. Inscriptions in her native Urdu and geometric designs influenced by Islamic art were frequently found in her creations.

Hashmi's works are still being looked at by people all over the world because they are part of prestigious museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.