About

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across diverse media in site specific installations that include drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, mixed-media, fabric works, digital media, laser-cut and hand cut patterns assembled into structures, printmaking, and print-based works. I’m driven by a fascination with nature and draw on its healing potential in my work, addressing displacement, identity, belonging, land/labor extraction, and climate catastrophe. My work engages fracture, rebuilding fragments into new wholes. I examine interconnectivity through patterns and sacred geometry from earthly to celestial realms.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my diverse projects are united by a commitment to healing through nature. From meditative walks and forest bathing to intricate, cosmological collages, I create settings designed for meditation and wonder—particularly at sites marked by trauma and displacement.

For site-specific artworks, I begin with a deep and sometimes challenging immersion: hiking through the northern mountains in my native Pakistan, and across the diverse geological landscapes of my adopted home state of Oklahoma. With the eye of a documentarian and the spirit of gleaner, I record evidence of natural and anthropogenic environmental destruction like erosion and decay or uprooted trees, gathering up driftwood, tree bark, dried plants, and other discarded detritus along the way. These broken and orphaned forms, mixed up and inter-combined, become the vocabulary for my installations and works on paper, often interspersed with fragments of my earlier works.

For me, uniting parts to create new wholes reflects my own life experience in resurrecting a future from the ruins of the past. My history is intimately tied to moments of dissolution and life rebuilt. My personal and creative journeys are deeply interconnected, with my artistic process becoming a way to carve a place for myself in the world: my installations are often ephemeral, site-responsive, and constantly evolving.

I studied at National College of Arts in Lahore, receiving a BA in fine art. In my 20s, I left Pakistan for the American South. During a traumatic divorce from a difficult marriage, I resumed my art education, earning an M.F.A. from the Memphis College of Art before ultimately settling in Oklahoma to become a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Throughout my works, from intricate pen and ink drawings to massive installations, I deploy patterns recurring in nature, the human body, and the cosmos, juxtaposing them with sacred geometry to expose the underlying interconnectivity of creation. Fractured Cosmos drawings combine neural and cosmic web networks with patterns from nature and geometric patterns connecting these micro and macro worlds in my art.

My interests in astrophysics and cosmology led to the Cosmic Veils installation. I used light as tool and material, suspending laser-cut fluorescent & transparent acrylic across the University of Tulsa’s Alexandre Hogue Art Gallery to create an immersive manifestation of the Western Veil Nebula. In my version, the supernova that began its existence with a violent death of a star is reinvented as a participatory installation that sparks wonder and play. During the show, students returned with flashlights to activate and animate the installation, experiencing it anew.

My large-scale commissions in Oklahoma channel nature’s rhythms and patterns to promote solace and healing. For The American Dream, a commemoration for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial, I devised a path through a nature preserve and forest, adorned with hand-crafted marigold flowers and concluding with a canvas tent similar to the ones survivors used. For Stories from the Core, a collaboration with the state’s libraries, I used my extensive documentation from travels across Oklahoma’s landscape in each geographical region to create installations of mysterious digital collages of images from Oklahoma parklands. Each library received a stack of art cards with the collages on one side and a meditative prompt for the audience on the reverse.

I explore landscape as a repository of history and memory, connecting with the spiritual dimension of landscape. Each new landscape becomes a site where the act of walking and entanglement of matter are activated with the energy of their own pasts. From Oklahoma and New Mexico, the manufactured landscapes of New York parks, and then to Pakistan, I’ve been hiking, documenting and creating ephemeral, site-specific installations across these landscapes.

Recently, I returned to Pakistan for major projects. For 2023-2025 project Acts of Disappearance, I solicited traditional caps from women in indigenous communities of Hunza in Northern Pakistan, who were displaced during a landslide. My vibrant installation of the caps at Attabad Lake in Gilgit-Baltistan became an offering, re-casting a site of erasure into one of refuge, healing, and renewal. In my recent solo show at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore, I used the embroidered caps to recreate the displaced site of Attabad Lake–an insistent call for the continued voice and visibility of the constituencies who once lived there.

In my works on paper, I bring my cosmological visions to human scale. I combine altered natural scenes and pieces of earlier artworks, illuminating compositions with extensive fields of gold leaf. Currently, one such collage in my Fractured Alchemy series is on view in the show “Trees, we breathe” at Wave Hill in Riverdale, Bronx, New York.

My practice is centered on "always becoming"—dynamic processes of transformation and evolution. “Becoming” is reflected in my native language Urdu’s concept of "kul"—where yesterday and tomorrow coalesce— shaping my understanding of fluid time and the possibility of rebuilding new futures from the broken wreckage of the past.

Bio

Sarah Ahmad (b. Lahore, Pakistan) lives and works between Tulsa, Oklahoma and Lahore, Pakistan. Ahmad earned a BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore; MA in Education from Union University, and MFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee, US.

The artist has held solo shows at Alhamra Arts Center and Rohtas 2 Gallery in Lahore; University of Tulsa and OKPop Musuem in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tennessee Arts Commission; among others. She has participated in exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Museum, UAE; Lahore Museum, Fakirkhana Musem, and Lahore Biennial in Lahore; Bates College Museum, Maine; Wave Hill, NY; James Gallery, NY; Glicrease Museum and Hardesty Arts Center in Tulsa, and Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Oklhaoma City in Oklahoma; Bikaner House, Delhi Contemporary Art Week, India; 1x1 Art Gallery, Dubai; Koel Gallery, Karachi; Asia Triennial, Manchester, UK; Irvin Arts Center, LumineArt Gallery, and Eisenman Art Center, Dallas, Texas; Katara Cultural Village, Doha, Qatar; Qatar America Institute of Culture, Washington DC; Los Angeles Center of Digital Art; among others. Ahmad has an upcoming solo exhibition at Koel Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan.

Ahmad has held numerous residential fellowships, including Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2019-2023) Art Omi, Every Page Foundation Fellowship (2025); Santa Fe Art Institute BIPOC awardee; International Residency Fellow at NARS foundation in Brooklyn (both 2024); and Virginia Center of Creative Arts 50th Anniversary Fellowship (2023). Other residencies include Vermont Studio Center Fellowship; SVA Summer Residency, NY; Paducah Arts Alliance, Kentucky; Otis College of Design, California.

Her work has featured in mainstream, art, and academic publications: USA Today, NPR’s Gallery America, PBS News Hour, ARTnews, Bomb, American Alliance of Museums, MIT Press, Southwest Contemporary, NPRs stations KWGS and KGOU, and international publications including Friday Times, Dawn, The News, Herald, Youline Magazine, and Gulf News. 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 funded by awards including the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, Andy Warhol Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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