Google Doodle today celebrates Zarina Hashmi, Indian-American artist's 86th birthday, know all about her

Today Google Doodle celebrates Zarina Hashmi, Indian-American artist and printmaker’s 86th birthday. Zarina was well-known for her key figures in the minimalist style. Guest illustrator Tara Anand from New York highlights Hashmi's use of geometric and minimalist abstract shapes to explore ideas of home, displacement, and borders in her illustrations. 

She used to create sculptures, prints, and drawings. Her work, which is connected to the Minimalist movement, made use of abstract and geometric forms to elicit a spiritual response from the observer.

She was born in 1937 in the little Indian town of Aligarh. Before the partition, she and her four siblings led a happy life but as soon as the tragedy occurred, Zarina and her family and millions of other people were compelled to go to Karachi in the newly founded Pakistan. 

Hashmi was 21 when she wed a young diplomat and set out to traverse the globe. She travelled to Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she was exposed to printmaking and modernist and abstract art trends.

She relocated to New York City in 1977 and became a strong supporter of women and female artists 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 later became a professor at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which offered female artists equal educational chances. She collaborated on the exhibition's co-curation in 1980 at A.I.R. Gallery, titled "Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States." 

Hasmi rose to prominence for her arresting intaglio and woodcut prints which incorporate semi-abstract representations of the houses and cities she had lived in.

Zarina's identity as an Indian woman who was born a Muslim and the fact that she spent her entire childhood moving from place to place both influenced her art. Her use of Islamic religious decoration's visual elements was particularly notable for its regular geometry. 

Her early works' abstract and understated geometric aesthetic has been compared to those of minimalists like Sol LeWitt.

Her work is still looked at by people globally as there are 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. 

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