About

Committed to social practices, I create public-facing art: immersive settings for deep presence. For me, art offers a conduit for transformative encounters with the earth. I confront the ‘nature gap’ experienced in marginalized communities: the effects of (dis)connection with the earth. From issues of access to green space and environmental racism, to global climate catastrophe. My commitment to processes of renewal is deeply personal: biographically I have lived through many phases of life requiring a rethinking and remaking. From art student in Lahore to immigration to the American South following an arranged marriage; to determination to free myself and children from a domestic setting overshadowed by spousal schizoaffective disorder; to professional artist. My history is intimately tied to moments of dissolution and life rebuilt.

In early 2025, I had my large-scale solo show in conjunction with the Faiz & Lahore Literary Festivals in Lahore. Faiz Ahmad Faiz was a radical 20th-century poet, and my installation, Struggles in Art and Radical Becoming was an homage to the spirit of his work. Since 2021, I have been explicitly engaging themes of land displacement and violence: transfiguring sites of trauma into embodied experiences of healing. Offering a means of reckoning and refuge. Most moving for me was the phenomenal outpouring of response to Struggles in… Radical Becoming: in Pakistan, these festivals are not just attended by the art elite. People travel in hordes to attend. Faiz stood for the people, for the oppressed. This was about creating a site for belonging, about providing people with something to take with them.

Where can we find public connection in a fractured society? I work in hopes of creating an elusive ‘third space.’ Employing eco-therapeutic principles, my installations offer aesthetic sanctuaries. A means of relating to the land, rooted in mutual care. Settings designed for meditation and wonder reimagine sites marked by loss and displacement into spaces for hope and healing. This practice converges personal with environmental, communal, historical, and socio-political narratives. Rooted in nature and its healing capacities, my art speaks to interconnectedness—across communities, between humans and the earth.

Urdu uses the same word for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ (کل | kul). Time fundamentally differs from the Euro–‘temporal imaginary.’ Kul reveals a Time not measured in a linear way, but a sensibility that is fluid: future and past coalesce. A time formed in the fluid space between—between people, between human and nonhuman energies—not individual but shared. As an immigrant to the US, I too live profoundly in-between. Multilinear time acknowledges trauma and the destruction of lands and transforms them into new landscapes. My practice is about rebuilding a future from the wreckages of the past, the process entails a radical dissolution—even of my own artwork—to manifest transformation; to manifest connection. As an immigrant, community and belonging are not static, but a process of continually engaging.

My past research into Sacred Geometric principles reveals recurring natural patterns across earthly, human, and celestial realms. I recognize pattern as both social force and aesthetic experience. The patterns of stories, of the earth, of geo-politics. Pattern illustrates the connective tissues binding us to the earth, to one another; binding the local with the global, micro and cosmic.

Sarah Ahmad

Bio

Sarah Ahmad is a multimedia artist and 2025 Every Page Foundation fellow at Art Omi, New York. Forthcoming shows include Trees, we breathe at the beautiful gardens, Wave Hill, NYC and The Golden Era Punjab: 19th Century Marvels at Fakir Khana Museum in Lahore, and Tum Apni II at Koel Gallery, Karachi.

Ahmad's career path challenges traditional success narratives. Lahore-born and raised, she's sought a place in the art world from a small urban setting in the American South. Currently based in the South|West, she's held multiple resident fellowships, most recently at NARS in Brooklyn and Santa Fe Art Institute (2024|25), and at Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2019–23). With fellowship funding, Sarah has created increasingly large-scale, public-centered art projects beginning with The American Dream (2021), which invited viewers to forest bathe at a nature preserve as a art of the centennial memorial for Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre. In 2022, her state-wide Stories From The Core was installed at public libraries across Oklahoma; and her ongoing project Unearthing Stories From The Core is international in scope.

Since completing her MFA in 2015, Sarah Ahmad’s artwork has been featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Most recently she mounted an expansive solo show at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore, alongside the literary Faiz Festival: ‘Tum Apni Karni Kar Guzro’—Struggles in Art and Radical Becoming (2025). Other recent shows include “Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center” at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine; the heat of the moment Satellite Art Show Miami Art Week 2024; and CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery, NYC. Prior shows include installations at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum and OKPOP Museum; Sharjah Museum of Art and the 1x1Art Gallery in UAE; the Asia Triennial in Manchester, UK; “Creativity in Quarantine: Women of the Pandemic,” in Washington, D.C. and Doha, Qatar; Delhi Contemporary Art Week, India; Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City; Hardesty Arts Center and University of Tulsa’s Hogue Gallery in Tulsa,OK; Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery in Nashville; Harvester Arts Center in Wichita, KS; ADC Fine Art in Cincinnati; LumineArt Gallery, Irving and the Eisenmann Arts Centers in Dallas, TX; the Yeiser Arts Center in Paducah, KY; the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art among others.

Sarah Ahmad has been interviewed by PBS News Hour, National Public Radio, the NPR station KWGS in Tulsa and KGOU in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Documentaries about her work are available on Google Arts and Culture, and in Emmy Award winning Gallery America’s episodes. She has been featured on the cover of OETA’s Odyssey magazine. Ahmad’s work has been reviewed in publications including Southwest Contemporary, ARTnews and featured in Bomb, Artnet News, USA Today, American Alliance of Museums, and Shahzad Bashir’s groundbreaking A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT, 2022). And internationally in Gulf News, published in Dubai along with numerous publications in Pakistan including The News, Dawn, Herald, Friday Times, Dawn, and Youline Magazine. Ahmad has given myriad artists talks, for example at Crowe Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and as an invited panelist at the 2022 South Asian Literature & Art Festival, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.

Ahmad earned an MFA from the Memphis College of Art; an MA in Education from Union University; and a BA in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

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