The Intersection of Islam, America and Identity

AFTER a long courtship over the telephone, Asma Ahmed, a painter in Karachi, Pakistan, married her fiancé, Rafi-uddin Shikoh, a business consultant in New York, in a bicontinental wedding by Webcam. When the new bride then moved to Queens in 2002, she tried to make herself at home by staking her claim through art.

In Pakistan Ms. Ahmed Shikoh’s work had been sociopolitical, addressing what she saw as the country’s colonization by American fast-food chains, for instance, with paintings like “The Invasion,” in which swarms of Ronald McDonalds, wearing screaming-red clown wigs, surround a central monument in Karachi.

Here, however, her art turned deeply personal as she grappled with her new identity as an immigrant and, having rarely set foot in a mosque back home, as a gradually more observant Muslim. In her first American paintings Ms. Ahmed Shikoh reimagined the Statue of Liberty in her own image: in a Pakistani wedding dress, as a pregnant immigrant and as a regal mother, baby on hip. Next she transformed the subway map with paint and calligraphic script into an Urdu manuscript that made the city feel more like hers.

Finally, in 2006, after she made the difficult decision to cover her hair, inspired by Muslim-American women who managed to combine faith and a career, Ms. Ahmed Shikoh began using the head scarf as a recurring image.

On the surface Ms. Ahmed Shikoh, now 31, has little in common with Negar Ahkami, 38, a sleek, raven-haired Iranian-American artist, beyond the wall space that they share in a new exhibition, “The Seen and the Hidden: [Dis]Covering the Veil,” at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Manhattan. Ms. Ahkami grew up in suburban New Jersey, considers herself only “technically Muslim” and toys with stereotypical images of exotic Middle Eastern women in her art.

Yet the two are both in their 30s, mothers of small children and emerging artists in the New York area. They are both exploring their identities as refracted through their backgrounds in the wake of 9/11. And they are both working to create a new kind of Islamic art that is modern, Westernized and female-centric. “As women artists of Muslim descent, Asma and Negar are both trying to discover who they are, to look at themselves and their heritage and to get beyond stereotypes,” said David Harper, a curator of the Austrian exhibition. “What’s so interesting is that they present two such very different ways to examine the subject from American soil.”