Baseera Khan
This is the fifth in a series of extended interviews from the making of Breaking the Code — the documentary film on artist Vernon Fisher. This conversation with artist Baseera Khan, a former student of Fisher’s, was recorded in 2022 at the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston on the occasion of Khan’s exhibition, Weight on History.
In the weeks before the interview took place, Khan had been involved in the production of an MTV and Smithsonian Channel reality TV show, The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, a competition in which the prize included an exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Baseera Khan tours the Hirshhorn’s collection storage unit with other contestants on The Exhibit. Photo: Shannon Finney
Khan ultimately won that prize, describing to me an experience early on in the competition during which the artists toured the Hirshhorn’s collection storage unit. Khan was surprised to see their former teacher’s painting pulled out on one of the museum’s storage gates. “They were opening up their collection to show us paintings. I looked into the nook and said, ‘I know that painter. This is Vernon Fisher! This was my professor in undergraduate school.” Seeing Fisher’s artwork in-person for the first time in several years, Khan was struck by the quality of the painting, stating it reminded them that “the first fundamental of making art is to create an environment where you want to look.”
Vernon Fisher, “Descent of Man,” 1986, collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Part of one of Fisher’s final cohorts of students at the University of North Texas before he quit teaching in 2006, Khan assumed their education would include a masterclass in classical painting. Instead, they found that Fisher’s lessons more often included references to cinema and literature. Khan describes the significance of Fisher’s influence on their creative and philosophical development, saying, “He was somebody that allowed me to understand that I don’t have to actually pick a medium or a genre, I could do whatever I wanted.”
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