Gift of photos bears witness to the world’s most vulnerable communities

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Gift of photos bears witness to the world's most vulnerable communities

The Block Museum of Art announces a gift of works by Fazal Sheikh in honor of Henry and Leigh Bienen

• Link to: Northwestern Now Story

EVANSTON, Ill. - The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a major gift of 14 photographs by internationally acclaimed artist Fazal Sheikh, given by the artist in honor of Interim President and President Emeritus of Northwestern University Henry Bienen and Leigh Bienen, senior lecturer emerita at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Spanning more than three decades of Sheikh's career, the gift brings together portraits and landscapes that reflect the artist's sustained engagement with migration, human rights and environmental justice. The gift includes works from several major bodies of work, from his early photographs made in refugee camps in East Africa and Pakistan to later projects examining environmental degradation and the long afterlife of political conflict. Over time, his work has grown to include personal narrative, writing and archival testimony alongside the portraits for which he is best known.

"Fazal Sheikh has spent decades working among the world's most vulnerable communities, and his photographs bear witness to their lives with rare dignity and humanity," said Lisa Corrin, Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director of The Block Museum of Art. "We are honored to bring this body of work to Northwestern where it will significantly impact teaching and spark new conversations for students across the University. That Sheikh chose to make this gift in honor of Henry and Leigh Bienen is a testament to their shared belief in the power of art to bear witness to the world."

Sheikh's relationship with Henry and Leigh Bienen stretches back to his undergraduate years at Princeton, where Henry Bienen was dean of the School of Public and International Affairs. Bienen went on to serve as president of Northwestern from 1995 to 2009 and is currently interim president during the 2025-2026 academic year.

"Fazal Sheikh has been a dear friend of my wife and me since he was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He also had the burden of being my squash coach," Henry Bienen said. "We are deeply honored and extremely grateful that Fazal has shared his wonderful art with The Block Museum and the Northwestern community."

In her scholarship, Leigh Bienen has focused in part on women and the law, a connection that resonates with Sheikh's longstanding attention to human rights and gender-based violence. This gift honors their four-decade friendship as well as The Block's 2002 solo exhibition of his work: "Fazal Sheikh: The Victor Weeps, Ramadan Moon, A Camel for the Son, Simpatia."

Sheikh reflects: "I have known Henry and Leigh since my undergraduate studies at Princeton University, when I was fortunate enough to find myself within their orbit, just as I was beginning to imagine the possibility of a life in the arts. The gift of Henry and Leigh's attention helped nurture a sense of possibility and bolster my resolve. In the years that followed, as I collaborated with some of the most vulnerable communities in the world, their insights and counsel on the human and political context surrounding the work proved essential. As Henry and Leigh near the end of their tenure at the University, I simply wanted to leave a marker in honor of all that they have made possible in my life."

Born in New York City in 1965 to an American mother and Kenyan father, Sheikh spent summers in Nairobi with his father's family, learned Swahili, and developed an early awareness of the social and economic inequalities that would shape his work. After graduating from Princeton in 1987, he began making photographs in East African refugee camps, establishing an approach that has remained central to his practice: quiet, direct portraits that honor the full humanity of their subjects. Sheikh has received numerous honors, including the International Center of Photography's Young Photographer Infinity Award in 1994, the 1995 Leica Medal of Excellence, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

The gift to Northwestern includes works from "A Sense of Common Ground," Sheikh's landmark early project documenting refugee communities in Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, including portraits made in Sudanese, Mozambican and Rwandan refugee camps. Each work is titled with the full name of the person pictured, a deliberate choice that resists the anonymizing language often applied to displaced people and affirms the dignity of each sitter. The gift also includes "Qurban Gul, holding a photograph of her son, Mula Awaz, Afghan refugee village, Khairabad, North Pakistan, 1998," from "The Victor Weeps," a project shaped in part by Sheikh's own family history and his grandfather's ties to what is now Pakistan.

Several works reflect a significant later development in Sheikh's practice: aerial landscape photographs examining erasure, extraction and environmental harm. Two photographs from "Desert Bloom," part of "The Erasure Trilogy," consider displacement and settlement in the Negev desert. Two diptychs from "Independence | Nakba" pair Israeli and Palestinian sitters born in the same year, inviting viewers to consider history and the unequal structures of conflict through portraiture. Additional works document uranium waste in Utah, oil extraction in California's Kern River Oil Field and ecological transformation at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.