♪ Coming up on "NYC Arts," a profile of an artist whose work brings the arts of the South Asian diaspora to the United States.

>> art is surprise, inspiring.

It's complicated.

For me, art is very much about knowledge construction, how I process things that are around me, if its history, politics, daily living.

All of it enters into the space of art.

>> And a visit to the Met and its recently reopened suite of 45 galleries dedicated to European paintings from 1300 to 1800.

>> In each of the 45 galleries, we invite visitors to explore a particular theme or look more deeply at a singular artist's work.

Landscape is a theme we explore.

Travel, place, time, artist, people are really the structure to this installation.

>> Funding for "NYC Arts" is made possible by Jody and John Arnhold, the Lewis Cine Turner fund for dance, at least Jeffrey and Jeffrey Brown, the Milton and Sally Avery arts foundation, foundation, the Nancy side water foundation, and Ellen and Marcu.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of cultural affairs in partner with the city Council.

Additional funding provided by members of 13 and by someone -- by Swann Auction Galleries.

>> we have a different way of looking at options, looking to combine knowledge with accessibility.

♪ >> good evening and welcome to "NYC arts."

I'm Paula Zahn at the New York City Gallery.

It's a place to experience history through groundbreaking exhibitions, immersive films, and thought-provoking conversations among renowned historians and public figures.

New York historical, the first museum in New York City, was founded in 1804 by a small group of prominent New Yorkers who were conscious of the significance of their time in history.

New York was and still is very much the center of the American experience, and the founders believed that collecting documents and objects would preserve that story.

Museum and Library holdings include more than 14 million documents, works of art, artifacts, and ephemera that cover 4 centuries of American history and art.

Included are photographs, furniture, silverware, and clothing, and the art collection includes drawings, paintings, and sculpture.

It's also the home of the Center for women's history, the first of its kind within the walls of a museum.

The goal of the center is to highlight often overlooked stories of women who had an impact on American history.

Currently On View is the exhibition women's work.

It examines how trends in American economic, legal, and political history have influenced which jobs, both paid and unpaid, have been performed by women.

It also explores the impact of race, ethnicity, social class, legal status, and sexual orientation.

On our program tonight, a profile of an artist who was born in Pakistan and moved to the United States in the 1990's.

She received her MFA at the Rhode Island school of design in 1995.

Over the subsequent years, her practice, which has expanded to include paintings, video installations, prints, and sculpture, has been pivotal in presenting the art of the South Asian diaspora to the United States.

She has received many impressive awards such as a MacArthur Fellowship, and the U.S. Department of State medal of honor.

Her work has been a staple of the local and international art scene for almost three decades.

She has also had exhibitions at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the Museum of fine arts in Houston, and the Guggenheim Museum in Spain.

In New York, her work has also been featured twice in Times Square art's iconic series " Midnight Moment."

she currently has a video installation On View.

Organized in collaboration with the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland museum of art, a major survey of her work will appear at the Palazzo surrounds of an axle in Venice later this year.

"NYC Arts" spoke with her in Chelsea where she was working on some of her latest projects.

♪ >> My name is Shahzia Sikander, and I am a painter, an artist, a multi-visual artist based in New York City.

I'm working on multiple prints for an exhibition in May of 2024.

Art lives, survives, inspires.

It's complicated.

It's messy.

It's very much like life.

For me, art is very much about knowledge, construction, how I process things that are around me, if it's history, politics, daily living.

All of it enters into the space of art.

Even as a child, art allowed me to Munich it -- to communicate more readily, more easily, more immediately and urgently by drawing than by expression or by speaking.

Women are so centered in my practice.

I'm always thinking -- how will women tell the story about themselves, versus somebody else's idea about us?

So how do you center women?

Often times, women in my work are proactive, intelligent, connected to the past in playful, creative ways.

Catalysts that move the narrative forward, catalysts of change as well.

So what is femininity?

For me, it's this tension between women and power.

The Madison Square Park project has been such an incredible opportunity.

The sculpture on the roof of the courthouse emerges out of a Lotus plant, which also functions as its plinth.

The feminine is at the center of both the sculptures "witness" and " Now."

"Now" is about the urgency allowing -- of allowing women to be represented in public spaces visually, scripturally.

Witness uses mosaics on the skirt.

That was my way of bringing my practice of mosaics right back into the cultural direction.

It was part of my project that I wanted to use the sculpture in two places and see how that could activate the conversation.

This character which is coming right out of my painting practice, so I was curious to see if the painting could exist as a sculptor as well.

"Gopi- Contagion" was part of an exhibit in midnight square.

They have silhouettes of hair or the shape of the head, these female characters that I painted a while ago.

It's this contagion, the residual of a female space, a female form, so I was invited again to another round of billboard, and I will be showing another animation, "reckoning" and really looking forward.

Different techniques that are unfolding here at pace conditions, primarily polygraph because I was working with a lot of different collage processes using fabric and paper to create the plates, to do relief printing.

So etchings and soft ground and then making works out of paper, paper pulp.

All these different directions.

Some will yield additions, and some may be one of a kind works of art.

>> This is the first sculpture that I made.

It was actually taken from a small detail that is in a painting that I made 20-plus years ago.

I worked with models and photographed them, and the piece was made on clay into bronze.

We were able to show that at the Sean Collier exhibit in fall of 2020, and later, that sculpture has traveled.

It has been really interesting to see how it activated my work in ways that were not necessarily being discussed 20 years ago.

I had a survey exhibition of the works I had done in the 1990's, organized by the Rhode Island school of design's Museum, which opened at the Morgan Library.

A lot of young people that came to see the works, it was the first time that they were seeing it.

For me, that was very fruitful, moving into mosaics and moving into stone and marble and sculpture and bronze and all of these materials that have more permanence that can exist and can be outside, outdoors.

What happens when you are no longer within the confines of a gallery or museum, but your work will be outside?

What are the stakes for that?

Simultaneous to the multiplicity and dynamism of drawing, which is the foundation and the core of all these different works in my practice.

Being Asian, Asian American, or Asian anything in the West is such a heightened place to be in because there's this paradox of being highly visible and then invisible.

It's such a broad category in which so many different cultures, ethnicities, nations, communities, languages have to provide -- have to vie to be recognized.

Initially in the early years of being in the U.S. in the 1990's, I remember how these categories -- I would always try to defy these categories or find myself being boxed into one and wanting to break out of it.

Over the years, I feel like the more categories, the merrier because it is such an American phenomenon, American identity, and American consciousness, these multitude of hyphenated identities.

How can I make art that can swim in and out of all of these categories, and even the categories that have yet to happen?

What is more important to me is how we reckon with our otherness in a shifting world.

Art is part of everything that we make or consume or give back.

It has consequences.

It has residents.

In that way, that art becomes history.

Imagination or art can be a source of abundance.

I love the fluidity and mobility that I think creativity offers.

Paula: For more information on cultural events in our area, please sign up for our free weekly email at N.Y.C.-arts.org/email.

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Next, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently reopened its suite of 45 galleries dedicated to European paintings from 1300 to 1800.

The reopening follows completion of an extensive skylight renovation that began back in 2018.

With more than 700 works from the museum's holdings, look again -- European paintings 1300 to 1800 invites visitors to reunite with old favorites such as masterworks by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Gioia -- and Goya.

The galleries are organized by themes that encourage the consideration of European paintings within the greater art of -- arc of history and artistic production.

Galleries also give renewed attention to women artists and those that are frequently omitted from the camera.

The curator in charge of the department who oversaw the reinstallation of the galleries will be our guide.

>> We have reinstalled the main suite of European paintings at the Museum that runs from around 1300 to 1800 in a series of 45 galleries that span approximately 2 acres.

We recognized one of the leveling planes that we could all return to for orienting ourselves is chronology that people would know when they were in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, and that would give them some spine to the experience.

In each of the 45 galleries, we invite visitors to explore a particular theme or to look more deeply at a singular artist's work.

Landscape is a theme.

Travel, place, time, artist, people are really the structure to this installation.

The roof above us is glass on this floor.

It's one of the great privileges of having our galleries here, that we can like them with natural light from above.

The advantage is that at different times of day, you get different effects of light, and on a great day, the animation that just is present, the sense of the lived, the momentary, the fleeting in the galleries as light shifts is really magical.

In a vast complex of the Metropolitan Museum, people have a limited amount of time.

No one can see everything here in one day, so what we have done in each calorie is signal what we call a collection highlight.

They allow people to see the work.

We have tried to systematize the experience.

We have opened up spaces so that galleries built upon galleries so that people always in any given space can look left, right, forward, or behind so that there is some kind of residual experience when they go through the galleries.

One of the great privileges of working with a collection is to see how the dialogue between works Mark certain experiences.

Behind me, a visitor can see a self-portrait by Rembrandt through the door.

They can see a self-portrait by van Dyck.

Next to that, a self-portrait by Rubens.

Three of the greatest painters of their time, seen in concert and dialogue with each other.

Those are the experiences that installations allow viewers to consider.

People imagine that we are mixing everything up and no longer allowing artists to represent their work, their style, the full range of their career, but in fact, if you look here, that is what we are examining, we are looking at in many ways a miniature retrospective of Rembrandt.

In the adjacent gallery, you can see more works by Vermeer than anywhere else in the world.

We put them all together for people to sit down, contemplate, and enjoy.

We have tried to diversify the representation of works in our galleries.

We have tried to bring in artists who otherwise are not canonical in their geographic period who reflect in many ways interesting ideas of their time.

We have tried to present a greater variety of subjects and of narratives, and included in that is works by women artists.

We are also pleased to be able to show for the first time some important works that have come in in the last couple of years, such as the works of the Italian still life painter and religious painter Orsola Caucia.

She's an example of the shifting narratives that our exhibition now invites viewers to consider.

We have Velazquez at the center of a gallery of Spanish painting.

An artist who was enslaved in Velazquez's workshop but later was freed.

We also have a gallery that looks at viceregal Mexico and Peru.

It's the first time a collection of that work has been integrated into the narrative of European painting.

Those works are truly extraordinary.

Very fresh, very different from what we traditionally show in these galleries.

It's a new collection even for the museum and a wonderful indication of some of the directions that our collection is growing in.

The residences -- the resonances that historic practice has on current practice is something we are very mindful of.

We have only one work by a living artist.

It is a large painting by Kerry James Marshall, a work of complexity, beauty, and narrative strength, and it anchors gallery that examines the question of the artist's studio.

It was a wonderful thing for us to think about as an idea but also a wonderful moment for us to bring works from different parts of our collection of paintings together with it.

We have the largest collection of worker -- of works by El Greco outside of Spain.

We also have some of the greatest barely Picassos, so to juxtapose his work from that period with El Greco is really a marvelous thing, and something that is singular about what we can do here in the European paintings department at the Met.

Paula: Next week on "NYC Arts," a profile of a composer and pianist who has spent the last decade pushing the boundaries of classical music.

>> Emphasizing at first was just my way of being a composer before I had any sort of music theory training.

I had, like, a little mini disc recorder and a piano and I would just kind of create fantasies.

It feels a little bit like throwing a stone in the water and observing the ripples and trying to find or follow some sort of radiating continuity, I suppose, out of that initial seed of an idea or initial stone.

Paula: Then a trip to Rome and an exhibition that reflects the artist's commitment to Expressionism and art for social change.

This is the first major retrospective devoted to the artist in a New York museum and includes more than 120 drawings, prints, and sculptures, focusing on themes of motherhood, grief, and resistance, the artist brought visibility to the working class and the necessity of a female point of view.

And a look at a highlight from the collection of the American folk Art Museum.

>> The phonological had happens to be one of my favorite artworks in the museum's collection -- the phrenological head.

In part because of its eerie beauty and the sins of quietness in the figure's face, which is somewhat at odds with the strange markings on the scalp.

It is exquisite as a work of art, and it has a poignancy that is linked to it by the artist's own story.

Paula: I hope you have enjoyed our program tonight.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at the New York historical Society.

Please join us next time.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on "NYC Arts," visit our website at nyc-arts.org.

Leonard, what a privilege to be able to sit down and talk with you.

>> I love being here with you, too.

Paula: We -- where are we?

>> we are at a moment to take nothing for granted.

>> it's important to be with this curator of an exhibition full of hope.

We are in the midst of some of the greatest sculptures by the iconic names.

♪ >> Funding for "NYC Arts" is made possible by Thea Petschek foundation, the Ambrose Monell foundation, Charles and Valerie Diker, the Milton and Sally Avery arts foundation, Elroy and Terry Krumholz foundation, the Nancy side water foundation, and Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of cultural affairs in partnership with the city Council.

Additional funding provided by members of 13 and by Swann option galleries.

>> we have a different way of looking at options, offering vintage books and fine arts since 1940 one, working to combine knowledge with accessibility.

If you are a lifetime collector, first-time buyer, or looking to sell, information at Swan ngalleries.com.