We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bushra Gill. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bushra below.

Bushra, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

If I went back in time and changed the course of my career, I don’t think I would be the person nor the artist I am now. Of course, I have thought about what my career would look like if I had not shelved my art career so long ago.

I had become a museum educator straight out of art school, thinking that working in the art world would give me insights that would help me as an artist. Instead, being surrounded by some of the best art in the world at MoMA had turbo-charged my inner critic, and I found that I couldn’t make a mark of my own without thinking it was derivative, boring–or just bad. Three years after graduating from Pratt with a sculpture degree, I turned my back on making art and switched to clothes.

10 years of fashion, a couple of sons, and a cross-country move later, I felt art calling to me again. This time however, motherhood was front and center, and as another artist said to me then, I would always be an artist, but my kids would only be young once. I returned to a regular art practice when my sons were both over ten & no longer needed me as much. It took a couple of years to regain proficiency, relearn how to use materials, and find my voice. But when I did, the hesitation and self-doubt wasn’t entirely gone, but so much quieter. It turned out that just living for a couple of decades was actually really good practice for telling stories in my work.

While I still want to be successful, my definition of that has changed. Getting to make art full-time has been a gift, and getting to share it with others through exhibitions is icing on the cake. I’m so pleased when someone chooses to include my work in their collection, but everything that happens after a piece is completed is totally separate from the making.

So, do I wish I had started sooner? I don’t like what if’s because I made the choices I did when I made them, and those decisions shaped the ideas I explore in my work. I am so grateful for the life I have had and look forward to what is yet to come.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I always thought being an artist was something I had to become, and only recently, realized it was already part of me from the beginning. I was so excited to be able to go to Pratt Institute to study art and live in New York–a big deal for an immigrant girl from a conservative Pakistani family growing up in suburban Texas. I learned so much about art and art history and life in general in the decades I lived there. However, I took a 20 year hiatus from making art and only returned to it a few years ago.

Now, I’m an artist who makes paintings and prints about belonging. Emigrating at a young age, I’d always felt a part of things but was actually apart from most everything. So in my work, I think about connection, especially an underlying structure of everything around us that unites us to each other and to nature, time and space.

I use images I’ve taken of trees, flowers, or people, and layer them with Islamic geometric patterns. I want to give a little taste of the stories behind the pictures, getting viewers to pause and think about what’s happening. My subjects are present, but veiled – much like my hair, which I cover with a scarf in public as a Muslim woman.

As I observe the world around me, I think about an overall invisible structure. I am interested in how we sense and connect to that unseen order by suggesting geometric patterns as one possibility of what that might be. The lines making the shapes remind me that everyone and everything is connected.

I think my work is recognizable, regardless of the subject or medium. The layered, kaleidoscopic imagery is how I try to see everything in the world: no one viewpoint is the exact right one, and our joint experiences make the image richer and more satisfying. If I can share that view, I will have succeeded.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I turned my back on making art and decided to pursue fashion, I was actually pivoting away from a career in education. I had been told in art school that fine arts majors should study education so they would have a way of making money. One of my professors was a museum educator, which seemed like the perfect fit, so I decided that was the way to go. But three years into an education career, I was unhappy and bored. Instead of making my own work, I was analyzing and explaining other people’s work. I was looking for themes, making connections between various pieces and artists, researching art history, and not making any of my own work. But I don’t give up easily, so I doubled down and tried coming up with interesting new programs at the nonprofit gallery I was working in, working well beyond the part-time hours I was paid for.

I started thinking about switching to fashion, the other major I had considered studying. I’d been making my own clothes since I was a child, having learned to sew from my mother. I began taking custom clothing orders while still doing my ed job, trying to figure out what to do with my life. Then, the unexpected happened: my boss, the very busy director of the gallery, noticed. She called me in for a meeting and said she had always been happy with my work, but that I didn’t seem so happy anymore. I was surprised, but mostly because I felt so seen. I might have eventually made the decision to leave education on my own, but I would have spent a lot more time finding my way there. With her encouragement, my life took a different turn at a critical time.

I did go on to work in fashion for 15 years, ten of them on my own store and clothing line. I continued to teach freelance in museums simultaneously too. When my family moved from New York to California, I quit fashion but returned to teaching regularly, this time in middle school, where my educator skills came in handy.

Where museum ed came most in use though was when I began curating. First with my own work, where I could step back and see themes emerging and recognize influences after the work was complete. Then, I found that all that experience from analyzing work in museums and galleries was the ideal training for giving feedback and curating other artists’ work. The path I thought was leading me away from what I wanted was actually the scenic route to the same destination!

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, was really helpful for me to find small ways to gradually adopt new ways of doing things. Adding a new habit to something I was already doing effectively bypassed all the anxiety and conflicting thoughts I usually have about change. For example, I already open my email first thing when I get into my studio, so adding a quick task of jotting down what I completed the day before into a journal starts me off with a sense of accomplishment. It also makes me want to write a new to-do list for that day, infusing a sense of structure and helps me focus.

Braving the Wilderness, by Brené Brown, was instrumental in making me see the value of my story. I used to think that I didn’t have anything important to say, canceling myself out before I even began. But after listening to Brené read me her book on audio, I was able to quiet the negative self-talk, remember that there is no such thing as perfection, and show up as my true self in order to belong in the world. I had always tried to belong and kept feeling apart from the world, but the raw honesty and proven research in this book helped me find the confidence to own my story, which I could then share in my work.

Finally, Daybook: Journey of an Artist, by Anne Truitt, spoke directly to my quandaries of being a parent and an artist. Truitt begins the book with a dedication to her three children, crediting them with giving her life purpose–a message I have not heard often for or from artist mothers. Throughout the daily journal entries of her practice as an artist, I saw parallels in my life, and her appreciation of caring for her family with nightly family dinners and regular household tasks made me see that those same things in my life could be a source of not just joy, but be a backbone for my creative life. Truitt was a female artist at a time when women were often passed over, but she wanted no part of assigning any difficulties she may have had to her gender. Plus, she reads her own audiobook, so the experience was like having a friend give me advice during a studio visit.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bushragill.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bushradraws/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bushra-gill-8178004/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bushradraws

Image Credits

headshot photograph by Alexandra Mathias

all artwork photographs by Bushra Gill