Book excerpt: Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial and other underrepresented narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories. This lively volume presents her powerful early work, created between 1987 and 2003, from South Asian, West Asian, and Western perspectives, illuminating new understandings for a wide audience. Charting her early development as an artist in Lahore and the United States, the book reclaims her critical role in bringing miniature painting into dialogue with contemporary art, especially in Pakistan, international art discourse of the 1990s, and contemporary global practices and debates.