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New York, NY – September 11, 2025 – BRIC Arts Media, the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS), and Zócalo Public Square are pleased to present Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America, an exhibition of porcelains, prints, video, and performance by Pakistani American artist Sarah K. Khan. In Khan’s most extensive solo exhibition to date, she presents reimagined scenes of African, Arab, and Asian world history grounded in manuscript research. Speak Sing Shout was commissioned, in part, to encapsulate the diversity of immigrant communities in the Northeast region for “What Can Become of Us?” an initiative to present artwork and public events envisioning new perspectives on migration, America’s changing communities, and how people come together across differences.
During a formative 2022 residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, Khan began working in slip cast molds and porcelain, a material whose own history is deeply entangled with narratives of colonial trade, imperial desire, and cultural appropriation. At the center of the exhibition is a set of eight new porcelain vessels, commissioned by the IAJS, placed on a tiled table with an abstracted medieval Islamic world map, created before cartographers documented the Americas. Each piece represents a single plant or spice used in cuisines surrounding the Indian Ocean – from black pepper to nutmeg – that, like porcelain itself, became coveted commodities on the global market. The vessels are decorated with imagery sourced from archives in the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the New York Botanical Garden. Each vessel is further decorated by a variety of the plants’ pre-colonial names, which trail around the edges, challenging the western taxonomy of botany that categorized and erased their origins alongside the cultures and knowledge systems from where they originated.
The surrounding walls will feature Khan’s Sultanate period miniature-inspired prints on Wasli paper and porcelain weapons and foodware from her series Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance. A reinterpretation of the 15th-century Persian text The Book of Delights/Life, Khan interprets both the pages of the manuscript and invents new “weapons of mass creation.” Commissioned by the Sultan of Malwa, the Book of Delights/Life served as a repository of elaborate recipes, each dutifully presented by a community of polyethnic women in attendance to their ruler. By arming them with guns, rolling pins, and knives, Khan recasts the women as autonomous and gleeful figures; “freeing” them from the confines of patriarchy.
On view in an adjoining room will be Khan’s video work The Cookbook of Gestures, where women cooks and farmers create a series of breads in Fez, Morocco. The video captures five recipes presented as a grid of short film loops of hand gestures, creating a meditative and rhythmic collective. The Cookbook of Gestures presents cooking as a learned and embodied knowledge integral to culture-creation and refutes the idea of recipes existing solely as written documents.
“What Can Become of Us?”
Speak Sing Shout is the third artwork commissioned for “What Can Become of Us?”, a year-long initiative from the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies and Zócalo Public Square, inspiring a national conversation through exhibitions, public programs, and essays, about migration and changing communities across America. The series opened in May 2025 with Mexican American artist Pedro Lasch’s sculptural installation Coatlicue & Las Meninas: The Stanford Edition at the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, followed in August by Chicanx and Punjabi American weaver Kira Dominguez Hultgren’s textile work So, I told her I was half-Indian at Zhou B Art Center in Chicago. The series will conclude in March 2026 with a new performance by Indian American Bharatanatyam choreographer and dancer Mythili Prakash at Stanford University.
“What Is the Language of Taste?” Opening Event, Panel Discussion, and Performance
Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America is on view at BRIC from October 7 – December 23, 2025. A public opening event and panel, “What Is the Language of Taste?”, will be held on October 9 from 6:30pm – 9:30pm. The event will include a performance by Khan; a panel moderated by IAJS founding faculty co-director Brian Lowery, featuring the “matriarch of Jewish cooking” Joan Nathan, Nuyorican community activist Power Malu, and NYU Professor of Food Studies Krishnendu Ray; and a reception featuring live music and food catered by street vendors from Street Vendor Project and EatOffBeat.
Note to media: A press preview will be held on October 3, 2025, from 10am-12pm. Please contact katrina@bluemedium.com for further information.
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About Sarah K. Khan
Sarah K. Khan (b. Mangla, Pakistan) is a multimedia artist and scholar based in Western Massachusetts and New York. Her practice is informed by extensive global fieldwork and research. Khan spent 30 years researching food and traditional ecological knowledge systems of Asia and the Middle East, including nutrition, public health, integrative medicine, plant sciences, and agro-ecology.
A two-time Fulbright Fellow, Khan holds a BA in Middle Eastern history and Arabic (Smith College), two master’s degrees in public health and nutrition (Columbia University), and a Ph.D. in traditional ecological knowledge systems and plant sciences (New York Botanical Garden–CUNY).
About BRIC
BRIC is a leading arts and media institution anchored in Downtown Brooklyn whose work spans contemporary visual and performing arts, media, and civic action. For over forty-six years, BRIC has shaped Brooklyn’s cultural and media landscape by presenting and incubating artists, creators, students, and media makers. As a creative catalyst for our community, BRIC ignites learning in people of all ages and centralizes diverse voices that take risks and drive culture forward.
About the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies
The Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies produces cutting-edge knowledge and bold solutions to realize racial and ethnic justice. We envision a world where race and ethnicity no longer adversely impacts people’s security, health, freedom, opportunity, political self-determination, or life experience.
About Zócalo Public Square
Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Zócalo is a unit of ASU Media Enterprise. Over its 20-year history, the organization has hosted more than 700 live public programs in cities across the U.S. and abroad, featured more than 2,000 guest speakers and performers, and published the work of over 3,500 established and emerging writers. Zócalo partners with cultural institutions, public agencies, and community organizations to develop, curate, and produce public programs, editorial projects, and multi-year series that engage broad audiences.
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For images, further background or interviews, please contact:
Katrina Stewart
Account Manager, Visual Arts
Blue Medium
katrina@bluemedium.com |
