New York became Zarina’s longest home. Her loft was simultaneously a place to live, a working studio, a refuge, and a meeting point within the city’s artistic communities.
New York 1976 · from Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, 1997
Space to live and work
A place of her own
Zarina first established her New York loft in 1976 and lived and worked there across more than four decades, returning permanently after her teaching years in Santa Cruz. The same space held daily life, printing, paper, correspondence, books, and the physical labor of the studio.
When she saw signs advertising “Space to Rent,” she transformed the phrase into Spaces to Hide. At that moment she was looking for a place of her own: somewhere to work, withdraw, and build an independent life.
A wider community
Art, politics, and new awareness
In New York, Zarina became part of a community of women artists and worked on the editorial board of Heresies for an issue devoted to “Third World Women.” Encounters with Hispanic, African American, Native American, Asian American, and other marginalized artists changed her understanding of American culture and politics.
The city also returned her to maps. Its museums, streets, friendships, and arguments sustained her practice, even as New York could feel like both a safe place and a place of solitude. The work held those two experiences together.
The remembered house
Home as other people
Later in life, the permanence of the loft did not erase her longing for Aligarh. She described dreams in which she returned to the courtyard and found the family gathered there, only to wake and remember that the people and house she sought were gone.
Home was therefore never only bricks and walls. It was made through the presence of other people—and could become foreign again through loss, distance, or time.
“New York is my city of dreams—the art you see here, the people you meet, to wake up in the morning and just walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art—it changes you.”
