SAB Visiting Artist Talk: Fazal Sheikh

Fazal at podium – Image credit: Alexandra Beck

Thursday, March 21, 5:30 p.m. 

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A17 

The photographer Fazal Sheikh, Princeton University ’87 and former visiting professor, will deliver the Art Museum Student Advisory Board’s annual artist talk.  

Sheikh has spent his career photographing individuals and communities displaced by conflict and environmental change. Acclaimed for his intimate portraits, Sheikh collaborates closely with his subjects to better understand and share their stories. In this talk, he will discuss his newest body of work, Exposure (2017–22). To make Exposure, set in the American Southwest, Sheikh worked closely with Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Native American grassroots organization, to examine the human and environmental costs of the exploitation of public lands. The expansive landscapes seen in the series pay homage to the spiritual significance of the land, while portraits and collected testimonies reveal the ongoing but often invisible effects of environmental racism, especially on Indigenous inhabitants. His work will be on view at the Denver Art Museum beginning in March 2024, and the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Exposures was previously on view at the Yale University Art Museum in fall 2023.

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