Siah Armajani
Template:Short description Template:Infobox artist Siavash "Siah" Armajani (Template:Langx; 10 July 1939<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> – 27 August 2020)<ref name=Sung>Template:Cite news</ref> was an Iranian-born American sculptor and architect known for his public art.
Family and education
Siavash Armajani was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 in Tehran, Iran.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He attended a Presbyterian missionary school.Template:Which He thought that his grandmother was the influence that started his political activism.<ref name=Cotter /> He began his art career making small collages in the late 1950s, visually mirroring Persian miniatures and political posters, to spread his vision of democracy and secularism and to publicize his party the National Front.<ref name=":0" />
After the monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi came to power, in order to protect him, his family ordered him overseas in 1960. Armajani immigrated to the United States, where his uncle, Yahya Armajani, was chair of the history department at Macalester College.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> There he studied art and philosophy, making Saint Paul, Minnesota, his permanent home.<ref name=":0" /> He met his wife at Macalester and he and Barbara Bauer married in 1966.<ref name=artnet>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=Sung /> He became an American citizen in 1967.<ref name=Cotter>Template:Cite news</ref>
Early career
The Walker Art Center was the first to acquire Armajani's work, after he entered two works into their biennial in 1962. They purchased Prayer, an intricately lettered Template:Convert canvas covered in Farsi poetry.<ref name=artnet />
Always interested in computing and engineering, during the late 1960s he took classes at Control Data Institute in Minneapolis, where he learned Fortran.<ref name=artforum /> Armajani taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1968 until 1979, where he met Barry Le Va, who introduced him to Conceptual art and then practiced in New York City.<ref name=artforum /> He participated in Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1969.<ref name=Sung /> In 1970, Armajani contributed two works to the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Information: first, A Number Between Zero and One, a Template:Convert high column filled with computer printouts of individual decimal numbers; and second, North Dakota Tower, a proposed spire Template:Convert high and Template:Convert wide calculated to cast a narrow shadow over the entire length of North Dakota from east to west.<ref name=artforum /><ref name=artnet />
Bridges
In 1968, he built First Bridge in White Bear Lake, Minnesota as Template:Convert narrowing to Template:Convert, illustrating our perspective vision.<ref name=Sung /> He built Fibonacci Discovery Bridge (1968–1988) to follow the mathematical Fibonacci sequence and, for the Walker's outdoor show 9 Artists/9 Spaces, he built Bridge Over Tree (1970), a Template:Convert long walkway with stairs that rise and fall over an evergreen tree.<ref name=Sung />
In 1974–75, he built more than 1,000 cardboard and balsa wood models of components of American vernacular architecture titled Dictionary for Building.<ref name=artforum />
In 1988, he designed the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis, uniting two neighborhoods previously separated by 16 lanes of streets and highway.<ref name=Artnews>Template:Cite news</ref> Armajani expresses three basic types of bridge construction: beam (the walkway), arch (eastern side), and suspension (western side). He commissioned a poem by John Ashbery that is stamped into the bridge's upper beams.<ref name=Whitney>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }} and Template:Cite magazine</ref> And in 1993, he built on one side in Loring Park, the pavilion Gazebo for Four Anarchists: Mary Nardini, Irma Sanchini, William James Sidis, Carlo Valdinoci.<ref name=artforum>Template:Cite news</ref>
Siah Armajani designed the Olympic Torch presiding over the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, but later disowned the project<ref name=artnet /> because the Olympic Committee failed to uphold their contract.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> This was the first time the Olympic Torch was created by an artist; all previous designs had been created by engineers or architects. <ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
He worked on other projects such as the Round Gazebo in Nice, France,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> the Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and projects in Münster, Germany; Battery Park City, New York; at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York;<ref name=Sung /> and at the North Shore Esplanade at the St. George's Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Staten Island, New York.<ref name=NYC>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Later career
In his later years, Armajani returned to his politically active roots.<ref name=Sung /> His 2005 work, Fallujah,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> is a modern take on Picasso's Guernica but was censored in the U.S. due to its critical view of the war in Iraq.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> It was recently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Seven Rooms of Hospitality is based on a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle.<ref name=Sung /> Room for Deportees (2017) speaks out to the hard line, anti-immigrant policies that took over in the US and Europe.<ref name=Sung />
An exhibition at Muelensteen Gallery in 2011 presented a dozen of Armajani's early pieces made between 1957 and 1962, created in the years leading up to his arrival in America. Many employ ink or watercolor on cloth or paper, and incorporate text. In his Shirt (1958), Armajani uses pencil and ink to completely cover his father's shirt in Persian script.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
The Minneapolis Institute of Art holds several works: Skyway No.2 (1980), a Template:Convert mahogany and brass portal; Mississippi Delta (2005-2006), a colored pencil on Mylar triptych picturing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and An Exile Dreaming of Saint Adorno (2009), a cage-like inhabited tiny house or stage named for Theodor W. Adorno.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Armajani was the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions,<ref name=artforum /> and his works featured in dozens of major exhibitions in the US and Europe.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, the first comprehensive US retrospective dedicated to the artist, was on view at the Walker Art Center September 9 through December 30, 2018,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and at the Met Breuer February 20 through June 2, 2019.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Death
Armajani died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27, 2020, at age 81.<ref name=Sung />
Awards and honors
In 2010, he won a Knight Fellow award granted by United States Artists.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2011, he was awarded Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and received a distinguished artist award from the McKnight Foundation.<ref name=":0" />
See also
- Islamic art
- Iranian art
- Islamic calligraphy
- List of Iranian artists
- Modern and contemporary art in Iran
References
Further reading
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External links
- Template:IMJ-Collections
- Siah Armajani at the MoMA
- Siah Armajani at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Siah Armajani: Follow This Line 2019 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Pages with broken file links
- 1939 births
- 2020 deaths
- 20th-century American sculptors
- 21st-century American sculptors
- Sculptors from Minnesota
- 20th-century American architects
- 21st-century American architects
- Architects from Minnesota
- Artists from Tehran
- Iranian emigrants to the United States
- Macalester College alumni
- 20th-century Iranian sculptors
- Calligraffiti artists
- Iranian modern painters