Calligraphy takes on new meaning in Chicago’s South Asia Institute exhibit

A realm in which visual beauty and meaning meld in the rendering of words, the art form of calligraphy dates back more than 2,000 years and can be found in cultures around the world, but it has an especially strong history in the Eastern Asian and Islamic worlds.

While traditional calligraphy in places like China followed codified rules, contemporary artists have taken the form in all kinds of unexpected directions, sometimes drawing inspiration from and even melding it with Western-derived abstraction.

The six-year-old South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan, examines this new brand of calligraphy with an expansive exhibition that should appeal not only to calligraphy and Asian-art devotees but also anyone is interested in a fresh, little-seen and engaging vein of contemporary art.

The show, titled “A Confluence of Music and Calligraphy,” contains about 55 paintings, drawings, art objects and original prints from the 1950s to the present with writing based on Urdu and Arabic. Running through March 15, it features more than 20 artists from South Asia, both residents and emigrants, most from Pakistan.

Shireen and Afzal Ahmad, retired doctors who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan, founded the institute, which spotlights the art, music and literature of South Asia, a region that incorporates such countries as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

“The people of that area have a common heritage, and it’s that heritage that we want to recognize and celebrate and promote,” said Shireen Ahmad.

The couple began collecting South Asian art on trips home to their native country in the 1970s, but their holding soon outgrew their home and now numbers about 1,000 objects. “We decided that we wanted to share the works on a larger scale and that they needed to be shown,” Shireen Ahmad said.

She noted that mainstream American art museums often show historical works from India, Pakistan and other parts of South Asia, but they rarely focus on modern and contemporary pieces from the region in part because many curators know little about them.

The couple scouted locations for the institute in the South Loop in part because real-estate prices were more affordable and the area was proximate to downtown. “We wanted to be on Michigan Avenue and close to main-line museums,” Afzal Ahmad said.

In 2017, they purchased a 1911 building in the Motor Row historic district that once served as a tire showroom for the B.F. Goodrich Co. The ornate structure, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, was designed by architect Christian Eckstrom in the Second Empire style, with a mansard room and terra-cotta balustrade.

After Sydney Barofsky, a doctoratal student at the University of Illinois Chicago, took over as the institute’s exhibitions manager in March 2024, they noticed that 60-70 percent of the institute’s holdings involve calligraphy. So, they decided to curate an exhibition with that focus, and the result is this offering.

There are examples of largely “pure” calligraphy in the show, such as “Untitled (Leeka),” a 2007 pen-and-ink drawing by Pakistani artist Mohammad Ali Talpur. It contains 13 horizontal bands of black-and-white calligraphy carefully ordered like what might be found in a book.

But nearly all of these selections blur calligraphy into other styles as in Pakistani artist Muzzumil Ruheel’s 2017 “Folded” series of 12 ink and acrylic drawings, each 13 by 10 inches. These are classic examples of Western-style geometric abstraction, and it’s easy to entirely miss the calligraphy at first. It is almost hidden in dense, layered patterns in sections of the folded forms.

It’s hard not to look at some of the works by Pakistani artist Rasheed Arshad, who has multiple selections works on view without thinking of the “Burst” series by famed American abstract-expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s “Blast I” (1957) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, features a red orb floating above a kind of black, shadow-edged calligraphic mass. Arshad’s watercolor, “Nukhta” (2001) is very similar but in reverse, with vertical calligraph floating above a red circle.

A whole gallery in the show (one of five thematic groupings) is devoted artworks that feature in some way the “nukhta” (also spelled “nuqta” or “nukta”), essentially a dot placed below a calligraphic character that is meant to suggest a sound not in the original scripts. It also carries philosophical meaning in Sufi thought and appears in a range of art and poetry. It is hard to believe that the Gottlieb, who drew on Native American petroglyphs and ancient hieroglyphs in his earlier “pictographs,” was not in some way influenced as well by the nukhta.

While nearly all of the exhibition’s works are two-dimensional, there are a few that break into three dimensions, none more imaginatively than an untitled 12-inch-tall mixed-media work from 2014 by Pakistani artist Ghulam Mohammad. Here hundreds of tiny, intricately pasted calligraphic cut-outs of Urdu letters jut from handcrafted wasli paper like a small, bristly rug.

Devina Dhawan, an Indian artist based in Chicago, has created “Paani Da Raang” (2022) a striking sea green-and-white teapot, which is adorned with a graceful, stylized calligraphic pattern that wraps around the body of the object.

Here are a few other highlights of the show:

• Arshad, “Untitled” (no date), oil on canvas. This 36-by-19-inch work could be the poster child for this show with it’s playful mix of colors and patterns — a pink orb floating above two square blocks — one with white-on-black calligraphic pattern and another with a more open, white calligraphic motif interspersed with red, yellow, blue and black.
• Shanzi Sikander, American, “Maligned Monster II” (2000), This beautiful piece, created using multiple print techniques, including aquatint, dry point and chine collé, pairs female figures from the Eastern and Western traditions, with golden calligraphy as an understated, decorative overlay. Though not obvious, an accompanying label explains that the piece is meant to critique biased Western perceptions of Indian sculpture and architecture.
• Sanki King,” Pakistani, “Solitude,” (2016), plastic emulsion, acrylic and spray paint on canvas. The largest piece in this show, with five panels each 48 by 36 inches, it is an example of “calligraffiti,” which melds traditional calligraphy and street art. The calligraphy, which blends into the abstracted landscape, is written in both Urdu and English.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, music also has a role in this offering, with a soundtrack playing in the gallery. It features songs that are favorites of the artists and, in some cases, even inspired specific works in the exhibition, the music complementing the swooping, stylized movement of the main attraction, the calligraphy.