SHAHZIA SIKANDER SCULPTURE VANDALIZED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
A massive sculpture of a female figure by the Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander was beheaded at the University of Houston on July 8. Meant to honor women and justice, the eighteen-foot-high bronze form of a tentacled woman with hair braided into a style that recalls a ram’s horns had earlier incited the wrath of Christian anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, which accused the work of “celebrat[ing] Satan’s deceit.”
University officials, who are said to have video of the destruction, lamented the opportunistic nature of the attack, which took place as Hurricane Beryl lashed the Texas coast after roaring up the Gulf of Mexico. “We were disappointed to learn the statue was damaged early Monday morning as Hurricane Beryl was hitting Houston,” said university spokesperson Kevin Quinn in a statement. “The damage is believed to be intentional. The University of Houston Police Department is currently investigating the matter.”
Titled Witness, 2023, the sculpture debuted last year in New York’s Madison Square Park as part of a public exhibition of the artist’s work jointly commissioned by the park’s conservancy and the University of Houston System’s public art program. The work went on view at the university’s Cullen Family Plaza in February and had been set to remain there through October 31. Officials canceled a February 28 opening celebration and talk after Texas Right to Life called for campus-wide protests over the sculpture’s presence.
Sikander in an artist’s statement accompanying the work’s New York presentation described the tentacles as symbolizing the amorphous nature of the self and the braided hairstyle as signifying sovereignty and autonomy. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she told Art in America in June. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”
The artist was succinct in her public response to the recent vandalism. “I don’t want to ‘repair’ or conceal,” she told the New York Times. “I want to ‘expose,’ leave it damaged. Make a new piece, and many more.”
