About

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sarah Ahmad is a multidisciplinary artist whose diverse projects are united by her commitment to healing through nature. From meditative walks and forest bathing to her intricate, cosmological collages, Ahmad creates settings designed for meditation and wonder—particularly at sites marked by trauma and displacement.

For her site-specific artworks, Ahmad begins with a deep and sometimes challenging immersion: hiking through the northern mountains in her native Pakistan, and across the diverse geological landscapes of her adopted state of Oklahoma. With the eye of a documentarian and the spirit of gleaner, she records evidence of natural destruction like erosion and decay, gathering up driftwood, tree bark, dried plants, and other discarded detritus along the way. These broken and orphaned forms, mixed up and inter-combined, become the vocabulary for Ahmad’s installations and works on paper, often interspersed with fragments of her earlier works.

For Ahmad, uniting parts to create new wholes reflects her own life experience in resurrecting a future from the ruins of the past. Her history is intimately tied to moments of dissolution and life rebuilt. Her personal and creative journeys are deeply interconnected, with her artistic process becoming a way to carve a place for herself in the world: her installations are often ephemeral, site-responsive, and constantly evolving.

Ahmad studied at National College of Arts in Lahore, receiving her BA in fine art. When she was in her early ‘20s, she left Pakistan for the American South. During her traumatic divorce from a difficult marriage, she resumed her art education, earning an M.F.A. from the Memphis College of Art before ultimately settling in Oklahoma to become a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Throughout her works, from intricate pen and ink drawings to massive installations, Ahmad deploys patterns recurring in nature, the human body, and the cosmos, juxtaposing them with Islamic geometry to expose the underlying interconnectivity of creation.

For her Cosmic Veils project, she used light as tool and material, suspending laser-cut fluorescent & transparent acrylic across the University of Tulsa’s Alexandre Hogue Art Gallery to create an uncanny manifestation of the Western Veil Nebula. In her version, the supernova that began its existence with a violent death of a star is reinvented as an immersive, participatory installation that sparks wonder and play. During the show, students returned with flashlights to activate and animate the installation, experiencing it anew.

Ahmad’s large-scale commissions in Oklahoma channel nature’s rhythms and patterns to promote solace and healing. For “The American Dream,” a commemoration for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial, she devised a path through a nature preserve and forest, adorned with hand-crafted marigold flowers and concluding with a canvas tent similar to the ones survivors used. For “Stories from the Core,” a collaboration with the state’s libraries, she used her extensive documentation from her travels to create installations of mysterious digital collages of images from Oklahoma parklands. Each library received a stack of art cards with the collages on one side and a meditative prompt for the audience on the reverse.

Recently, Ahmad has returned to Pakistan for major projects. In her 2023-2025 project “Acts of Disappearance,” she solicited traditional caps from women in indigenous communities of Hunza in Northern Pakistan, who were displaced during a landslide. Ahmad’s vibrant installation of the caps at Attabad Lake in Gilgit-Baltistan became an offering, re-casting a site of erasure into one of refuge, healing, and renewal. In her recent solo show at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore, she used the embroidered caps to recreate the displaced site of Attabad Llake–an insistent call for the continued voice and visibility of the constituencies who once lived there.

In her works on paper, Ahmad brings her cosmological visions to human scale. She combines altered natural scenes and pieces of earlier artworks, illuminating her compositions with extensive fields of gold leaf. Currently, one such collage in her “Fractured Alchemy” series is on view in the show “Trees, we breathe” at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York.

A resident artist at Art Omi in the summer of 2025, Ahmad is currently working on a new series of collages and drawings, with images highlighting living conditions of South Asian migrant workers in the Persian Gulf states. The work expands on her goals of creative change-making, using her access, empathy, and ingenuity to bring attention to displacement of communities around the globe.

Bio

Sarah Ahmad is a multimedia artist and 2025 Every Page Foundation fellow at Art Omi, New York. Current and recent shows include Trees, we breathe at the beautiful gardens, Wave Hill, NYC, The Golden Era Punjab: 19th Century Marvels at Fakir Khana Museum in Lahore, solo shows: ‘Tum Apni Karni Kar Guzro’—Struggles in Art and Radical Becoming, and forthcoming show Tum Apni Karni II at Koel Gallery, Karachi.

Ahmad's career path challenges traditional success narratives. Lahore-born and raised, she's sought a place in the art world from a small urban setting in the American South. Currently based in the South|West, she's held multiple resident fellowships, most recently at NARS in Brooklyn and Santa Fe Art Institute (2024|25), and at Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2019–23). With fellowship funding, Ahmad has created increasingly large-scale, public-centered art projects beginning with The American Dream (2021), which invited viewers to forest bathe at a nature preserve as a art of the centennial memorial for Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre. In 2022, her state-wide Stories From The Core was installed at public libraries across Oklahoma; and her ongoing project Unearthing Stories From The Core is international in scope.

Since completing her MFA in 2015, Sarah Ahmad’s artwork has been featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Most recently she mounted an expansive solo show at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore, alongside the literary Faiz Festival. Other recent shows include “Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center” at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine; the heat of the moment Satellite Art Show Miami Art Week 2024; and CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery, NYC. Prior shows include installations at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum and OKPOP Museum; Sharjah Art Museum and the 1x1Art Gallery in UAE; the Asia Triennial in Manchester, UK; “Creativity in Quarantine: Women of the Pandemic,” in Washington, D.C. and Doha, Qatar; Delhi Contemporary Art Week, India; Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City; Hardesty Arts Center and University of Tulsa’s Hogue Gallery in Tulsa,OK; Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery in Nashville; Harvester Arts Center in Wichita, KS; ADC Fine Art in Cincinnati; LumineArt Gallery, Irving and the Eisenmann Arts Centers in Dallas, TX; the Yeiser Arts Center in Paducah, KY; the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art among others.

Sarah Ahmad has been interviewed by PBS News Hour, National Public Radio, the NPR station KWGS in Tulsa and KGOU in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Documentaries about her work are available on Google Arts and Culture, and in Emmy Award winning Gallery America’s episodes. She has been featured on the cover of OETA’s Odyssey magazine. Ahmad’s work has been reviewed in publications including Southwest Contemporary, ARTnews and featured in Bomb, Artnet News, USA Today, American Alliance of Museums, and Shahzad Bashir’s groundbreaking A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT, 2022). And internationally in Gulf News, published in Dubai along with numerous publications in Pakistan including The News, Dawn, Herald, Friday Times, Dawn, and Youline Magazine. Ahmad has given myriad artists talks, for example at Crowe Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and as an invited panelist at the 2022 South Asian Literature & Art Festival, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.

Ahmad earned an MFA from the Memphis College of Art; an MA in Education from Union University; and a BA in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan.

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