Siah Armajani | |
|---|---|
| Born | Siavash Armajani (1939-07-10)10 July 1939 |
| Died | 27 August 2020(2020-08-27) (aged 81) |
| Nationality | Iranian American |
| Awards | Knight Fellow Award (US Artists), Chevalier of theOrdre des Arts et des Lettres,McKnight Foundation |
Siavash "Siah" Armajani (Persian:سیاوش ارمجانی; 10 July 1939[1] – 27 August 2020)[2] was anIranian-born Americansculptor andarchitect known for his public art.
Siavash Armajani was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 inTehran,Iran.[3] He attended a Presbyterian missionary school.[which?] He thought that his grandmother was the influence that started his political activism.[4] He began his art career making smallcollages in the late 1950s, visually mirroring Persian miniatures and political posters, to spread his vision of democracy and secularism and to publicize his party theNational Front.[3]
After the monarch ShahMohammad 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 atMacalester College.[5] There he studied art and philosophy, makingSaint Paul, Minnesota, his permanent home.[3] He met his wife at Macalester and he and Barbara Bauer married in 1966.[6][2] He became anAmerican citizen in 1967.[4]
TheWalker Art Center was the first to acquire Armajani's work, after he entered two works into their biennial in 1962. They purchasedPrayer, an intricately lettered 70-inch (180 cm) canvas covered in Farsi poetry.[6]
Always interested in computing and engineering, during the late 1960s he took classes atControl Data Institute in Minneapolis, where he learnedFortran.[7] Armajani taught at theMinneapolis College of Art and Design from 1968 until 1979, where he metBarry Le Va, who introduced him toConceptual art then practiced inNew York City.[7] He participated inArt by Telephone at theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1969.[2] In 1970, Armajani contributed two works to theMuseum of Modern Art exhibitionInformation: first,A Number Between Zero and One, a 9-foot (2.7 m) high column filled with computer printouts of individual decimal numbers; and second,North Dakota Tower, a proposed spire 18 miles (29 km) high and 2 miles (3.2 km) wide calculated to cast a narrow shadow over the entire length ofNorth Dakota from east to west.[7][6]
In 1968, he builtFirst Bridge inWhite Bear Lake, Minnesota as 10 feet (3.0 m) narrowing to 4 feet (1.2 m), illustrating our perspective vision.[2] He builtFibonacci Discovery Bridge (1968–1988) to follow the mathematicalFibonacci sequence and, for the Walker's outdoor show9 Artists/9 Spaces, he builtBridge Over Tree (1970), a 91-foot (28 m) long walkway with stairs that rise and fall over an evergreen tree.[2]
In 1974–75, he built more than 1,000 cardboard and balsa wood models of components of Americanvernacular architecture titledDictionary for Building.[7]
In 1988, he designed theIrene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis, uniting two neighborhoods previously separated by 16 lanes of streets and highway.[9] Armajani expresses three basic types of bridge construction: beam (the walkway), arch (eastern side), and suspension (western side). He commissioned a poem byJohn Ashbery that is stamped into the bridge's upper beams.[8] And in 1993, he built on one side inLoring Park, the pavilionGazebo for Four Anarchists: Mary Nardini, Irma Sanchini, William James Sidis, Carlo Valdinoci.[7]
Siah Armajani designed theOlympic Torch presiding over the1996 Summer Olympics inAtlanta,Georgia,United States, but later disowned the project[6] because the Olympic Committee failed to uphold their contract.[10] This was the first time the Olympic Torch was created by an artist; all previous designs had been created by engineers or architects.[11]
He worked on other projects such as theRound Gazebo inNice,France,[12] theSacco and Vanzetti Reading Room at theMuseum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and projects inMünster, Germany;Battery Park City, New York; atStorm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York;[2] and at the North Shore Esplanade at the St. George'sStaten Island Ferry Terminal in Staten Island, New York.[13]
In his later years, Armajani returned to his politically active roots.[2] His 2005 work,Fallujah,[14] is a modern take onPicasso'sGuernica but was censored in the U.S. due to its critical view of the war in Iraq.[15] It was recently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Seven Rooms of Hospitality is based on a conversation betweenJacques Derrida andAnne Dufourmantelle.[2]Room for Deportees (2017) speaks out to the hard line, anti-immigrant policies that took over in the US and Europe.[2]
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 hisShirt (1958), Armajani uses pencil and ink to completely cover his father's shirt in Persian script.[16]
TheMinneapolis Institute of Art holds several works:Skyway No.2 (1980), a 5-foot (1.5 m) mahogany and brass portal;Mississippi Delta (2005-2006), a colored pencil on Mylar triptych picturing the aftermath ofHurricane Katrina; andAn Exile Dreaming of Saint Adorno (2009), a cage-like inhabited tiny house or stage named forTheodor W. Adorno.[17][18][19]
Armajani was the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions,[7] and his works featured in dozens of major exhibitions in the US and Europe.[20]Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, the first comprehensive US retrospective dedicated to the artist, was on view at theWalker Art Center September 9 through December 30, 2018,[21] and at theMet Breuer February 20 through June 2, 2019.[22]
Armajani died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27, 2020, at age 81.[2]
In 2010, he won a Knight Fellow award granted byUnited States Artists.[23] In 2011, he was awarded Chevalier of theOrdre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and received a distinguished artist award from theMcKnight Foundation.[3]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
