The Humanities Center 2025 Spring Lecture Series on "Banned Books and Censorship" continues on Wednesday, April 2, with Rashmi Viswanathan, Assistant Professor of Art History, who will give the talk "Shahzia Sikander’s Witness and the Censorship of Public Art," from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies.
Here, Professor Viswanathan will address the recent controversies surrounding the display of the Pakistan-born artist’s Witness, which was put on exhibition on the campus of the University of Houston’s Cullen Family Plaza of Public Art. The work, an exploration of feminine archetypes and their embodiment in South Asian and other artistic iconographies that honor a feminist present and potential future, has been deemed as blasphemous and “promoting child sacrifice” by the Texas Right to Life organization.