Tehniyet Masood
1979*, Karachi
Tehniyet Masood is an award winning Manhattan based artist. Originally from Pakistan, she grew up in Karachi in a creative home fashioned with custom built objects and furniture. These objects would become the early points of curiosity and influence. Masood would start painting at an early age and later receive scholarships to paint at Bennington College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With over 23 years of experience as a formally trained painter and sculptor, Tehniyet Masood has built large site specific public art installations using an extensive range of materials and applications. In 2021 she was the recipient of the Outstanding Women Award presented by the Women Builders Council in New York City, and the EllevateHer Forward Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Vernissage TV and other publications.
Tehniyet studied painting, sculpture, and 3D Animation at Bennington College. It is here that she would start building out structures from her large paintings. This process would continue to guide her future site specific work. In 1999 Masood would spend two winter months apprenticing with the Siberian sculptor Leonti Usov in Tomck, Russia. Usov taught Masood the craft of chiseling until you find what is in the block of wood. This time would be an education in careful precision and an absolute devotion to a craft.
Tehniyet Masood has created work at international art residencies in Argentina, and Spain. Some common themes of exploration in her work are belonging, separation, identity, adversity, aspirations and the universal human experience. Her large site specific installations draw from narrative storytelling, video, sound, and music set the mood for each installation. Movement, texture, color and nature inform the compositions and the viewer’s experience.
Currently she is working on a larger body of work titled “Four Seasons”, a collection of work developed during the pandemic. This body of work displays the depth of her repertoire as an artist.