Santa Cruz gave Zarina a printmaking workshop and a community of students. Her journeys between California, New York, and Pakistan also sharpened the question of where home was located.
Santa Cruz 1992–1997 · from Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines, 1997
University of California
The responsibility of teaching
In 1992, the University of California, Santa Cruz offered Krishna Reddy a teaching position. He recommended Zarina instead, and she accepted. She sublet her New York studio while teaching in California through 1997, then returned to New York full-time in 1998.
She described the university printmaking workshop as the most beautiful she had worked in. Teaching mattered deeply to her: she felt responsible when a student struggled and devoted the Santa Cruz term to their work. She made much of her own art when she returned to New York.
Between homes
Dislocation as a working condition
During these years Zarina moved among Santa Cruz, New York, and Pakistan, where she visited family. She called Santa Cruz the tenth city she had lived in and described how “going home” could mean New York, Pakistan, or America, depending on where she stood.
This repeated disorientation helped shape Home is a Foreign Place. She listed Urdu words associated with home, had a calligrapher write them in Pakistan, then developed images for them in New York.
The Pacific and the printed line
Coastal blue, night sea, and Urdu poetry
The 1996 Santa Cruz portfolio joins the place of teaching to a distinctly local visual atmosphere. Four etchings—Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Night Sea, and Dark Sea—move from coast to darkness in blue ink. The color is unusually present within a practice often associated with black, white, and the warm tones of handmade paper; here it carries distance, weather, and the changing surface of the Pacific.
A separate line by Faiz Ahmad Faiz closes the portfolio in Urdu: “But the heart cannot let go of its loneliness.” Landscape and language remain separate but resonant. The coast is not presented as a picturesque refuge. It becomes another place through which Zarina could measure solitude, movement, and the difficulty of naming any single location as home.
“I went up and down and across America, across the world, and I really forgot where I was. … I got totally confused about where home was.”
Zarina
Teaching and printmaking
Inside the Santa Cruz workshop
Zarina began teaching printmaking at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1992. The workshop became a place for sustained exchange with students and for portfolios in which the California coast entered her language of paper, line, and displacement.
University print shop · UC Santa CruzZarina teaching printmaking · UC Santa CruzZarina with students · UC Santa Cruz
