Anila Quayyum Agha

In 2008 Agha moved to Indianapolis to teach at[6] Herron School of Art, where she was the Associate Professor of Drawing. In 2020, she was appointed Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta University in Georgia.

Working from her background in textile and fabric art and design, Agha uses a combination of textile processes such as embroidery, wax, dyes, and silk-screen printing within her drawings and paintings. She creates patterns based on ancient Islamic geometric patterns and Islamic interlace patterns through hand cutting, laser cutting, and sewing on paper. She uses embroidery as a drawing method to bridge the gap between modern materials and historical patterns of traditional oppression and domestic servitude. She questions the gendering of textile work as domesticated and its exclusion of it being considered an art form.[7]

In 2013 Agha started to explore working with light and shadow, in her piece 'Intersections', a 6.5' laser-cut wood cube encasing a light bulb, she pushed the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic by relying on the symmetry of geometric design and the interpretation of the cast shadows.[8] The walls of the cube showcase Moorish patterns inspired from the Alhambra,a place where Islamic and Christian worlds intersect.[9] Growing up as a girl in Pakistan, Agha was not allowed to visit the mosques because of her gender. It was from these memories of exclusion and of visiting the Alhambra that Agha started to think about all the problems that arise because of exclusion and wanted to create something that would include all, regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity.[10]