MoMA opens “Fractured Skies” exhibition by Indian artist Nilima Sheikh today — her first solo show in New York

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) opens today, September 27, 2026, the exhibition “Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies” — the first solo presentation in New York of the Indian artist Nilima Sheikh (born 1945). The exhibition, as SeeGreatArt reports, is organized in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi and will remain open until June 13, 2027.

The exhibition brings together works from three major cycles of the last two decades, tracing the artist’s investigation of trauma, loss, memory and renewal. At its center is a selection from the cycle “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams” (2003–2014) — suspended scrolls, painted on both sides in casein tempera on unstretched canvas, reflecting on the region of Kashmir. Around them, in horizontal format, are works from the “Home, Land” cycle (2023–2025) — mixed tempera paintings on paper about the precarious lives of the Bakarwal nomadic communities of Jammu and Kashmir. And debuting at MoMA is “Shahid/Witness” — ten monumental suspended scrolls, commissioned by KNMA, responding in a site-specific way to the architecture of MoMA’s Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III gallery.

In the artist’s own words, “the artist’s role is to bear witness — both to the past and to the present.” Over five decades, Sheikh has renewed narrative painting as a form of historical testimony and social engagement, confronting histories of displacement and violence, especially the partition of Punjab and the contestation of Kashmir. Her works display geographies in motion, figures at work, maps, poetry, traces of erasure and stillness — a space where both the fragility of present times and the persistence of life and hope become visible.

Born in 1945 in New Delhi and based in Baroda, Nilima Sheikh studied history at the University of Delhi (1962–1965) and earned her master’s in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (1971). She is considered one of South Asia’s most significant artists today; her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Guggenheim Museum Abu Dhabi. The exhibition is co-organized by Cara Manes, associate curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, and Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator of KNMA — India’s first private museum dedicated to the modern and contemporary art of the subcontinent, opened in 2010 on the initiative of collector Kiran Nadar.