biography

Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist interested in materials, color, and their economies. From public art installation to sculpture, painting to performance and music, Khan collages the effects of these relationships to labor and family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan has performed and exhibited at several locations in the past years sharing this diverse practice.

Currently, Khan is included in Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now, a collection exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, curated by Lauren Hinkson. In 2025, Khan presented a solo exhibition with Niru Ratnam Gallery, London, U.K., and completed New Leaf, a permanent public art commission for HELP USA in Brooklyn, New York. In 2023, High Line Art, New York, commissioned Khan's first large-scale outdoor sculpture, Painful Arc II, Shoulder High, which remained on view through 2024. Khan also presented a solo exhibition at 10 & Zero Uno, Venice, Italy (2024).

Solo institutional exhibitions include MassArt, Boston, MA (2026); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2023); the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021–22); and a touring solo exhibition organized by the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX, which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2022–23). Earlier solo exhibitions include Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2019), Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Colorado (2018) and Participant Inc, New York (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include the Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2026); Ruttkowski;68, New York (2026); Sargent's Daughters, New York (2026); Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers University, New Jersey (2025); 12 Gates, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2025); Patel Brown, Toronto, Canada (2025); and the North Carolina Museum of Art (2024). Earlier exhibitions include the Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India (2022-23); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2021); the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana (2020); the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich, Germany (2019); Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, New York (2019); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2018); Sculpture Center, New York (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2017).

Khan's performance work has premiered at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Residencies include Plop, London, U.K. (2024); Lux Art Institute, San Diego (2021); the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Residency (2020); a six-week performance residency at The Kitchen, New York (2020); Pioneer Works (2018–19); Abrons Arts Center (2016–17); an International Travel Fellowship to Jerusalem and Ramallah through apexart (2015); and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2014).

Khan is the recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Michael Richards Award for Visual Art (2024), was honored as the Hirshhorn Museum Gala Artist Honoree (2023) and 50th Anniversary Honoree (2024), and received the Artist Prize on the MTV/Smithsonian Channel docuseries The Exhibit (2022–23). Additional honors include the UOVO Art Prize (2020), the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), and awards from NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018).

Khan's work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Khan received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005). Khan is currently teaching as an Adjunct Associate, for M.FA. programs Columbia University and School of Visual Artist in New York.

“Material creates identity, not the other way around. The pressure of identity is too great and too constructed, so I work to unmap gender, economies, and colonial ideologies. Through collage, form, and color, I try to emancipate representation and explanation from the inherited responsibilities of objects, images, and performance. I abstract identity through multiple ways of working, keeping viewers guessing. My life's work is dedicated to building a legacy on my own terms. Using architecture, fashion, painting, photography, textiles, music, parody, and sculpture, I manifest a femme, native-born Muslim American experience from the edges of visual histories.”