I think this sort of focus on something that is traditional so that then you can say

or you're either breaking the tradition or you're like a contemporizing tradition.

This polarity I think is something a tendency and I kind of wanted to kind of diminish that.

Welcome back to working. I'm your host Isaac Butler and I'm your other host,

Ruman Alon. Ruman, who was that person we heard at the top of the episode?

I'm so excited this week because I spoke to the artist Shazia's seconder.

Shazia is a visual artist, sort of an artist of all trades.

You know, her work isn't so many mediums but I first knew of her paintings.

Shazia is the subject of a mid-career retrospective that's in New York now at the Morgan

Librarian Museum. It's a show that looks back at her student work and a period before 9-11 mostly.

Shazia is a really fascinating American artist and I think it's probably safe to say

one of the most prominent American artists of South Asian descent working today,

even if that's a reductive way of talking about her, which we'll get to in our chat.

Amazing and I think we should probably maybe elaborate on something real quick which is that

quite a bit of this conversation is about a particular subgenre of painting called Manuscript

Painting. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is and how it works?

Yes, with some trepidation, you know, for fear of like angry emails from any of the art historians

who happen to be in our audience, but we're tap dancing about architecture, right?

Exactly. I will take a stab at it, right? I had to confront the difficulty in this

conversation of speaking to a visual artist in an audio medium, this podcast, right? It's hard

to talk about what something looks like. But the term that we use for the vernacular of Shazia's

early work and it's still evident and influential in the art that she makes today is Manuscript

...