{"id":92043,"date":"2021-01-16T12:35:20","date_gmt":"2021-01-16T17:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=92043"},"modified":"2021-04-30T06:39:55","modified_gmt":"2021-04-30T11:39:55","slug":"auto-draft-441","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2021\/01\/16\/auto-draft-441\/","title":{"rendered":"Iranian-American Sculptor and Architect, SIAH ARMAJANI"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 10, 1939 – August 27, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

(taken from Wikipedia)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Family and education<\/strong><\/p>\n

Siavash Armajani an Iranian-American sculptor and architect.was born on July 10, 1939 and passed away on August 27, 2020. He was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 in\u00a0Tehran,\u00a0Iran.\u00a0He attended a Presbyterian missionary school. He thought that his grandmother was the influence that started his political activism.\u00a0He began his art career making small\u00a0collages\u00a0in the late 1950s, visually mirroring Persian miniatures and political posters, to spread his vision of democracy and secularism and to publicize his party the\u00a0National Front.<\/p>\n

After the monarch Shah\u00a0Mohammad Reza Pahlavi\u00a0came 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\u00a0Macalester College. There he studied art and philosophy, making\u00a0Saint Paul, Minnesota, his permanent home.\u00a0He met his wife at Macalester and he and Barbara Bauer married in 1966.\u00a0He became an\u00a0American citizen\u00a0in 1967.<\/p>\n

Early career<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Walker Art Center was the first to acquire Armajani\u2019s work, after he entered two works into their biennial in 1962. They purchased\u00a0Prayer<\/em>, an intricately lettered 70-inch (180\u00a0cm) canvas covered in Farsi poetry.<\/p>\n

Always interested in computing and engineering, during the late 1960s he took classes at\u00a0Control Data Institute\u00a0in Minneapolis, where he learned\u00a0Fortran.\u00a0Armajani taught at the\u00a0Minneapolis College of Art and Design\u00a0from 1968 until 1974, where he met\u00a0Barry Le Va, who introduced him to\u00a0Conceptual art\u00a0then practiced in\u00a0New York City.\u00a0He participated in\u00a0Art by Telephone<\/em>\u00a0at the\u00a0Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago\u00a0in 1969.\u00a0In 1970, Armajani contributed two works to the\u00a0Museum of Modern Art\u00a0exhibition\u00a0Information<\/em>: first,\u00a0A Number Between Zero and One<\/em>, a 9-foot (2.7\u00a0m) high column filled with computer printouts of individual decimal numbers; and second,\u00a0North Dakota Tower<\/em>, a proposed spire 18 miles (29\u00a0km) high and 2 miles (3.2\u00a0km) wide calculated to cast a narrow shadow over the entire length of\u00a0North Dakota\u00a0from east to west.<\/p>\n

In 1968, he built\u00a0First Bridge<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0White Bear Lake, Minnesota\u00a0as 10 feet (3.0\u00a0m) narrowing to 4 feet (1.2\u00a0m), illustrating our perspective vision.\u00a0He built\u00a0Fibonacci Discovery Bridge<\/em>\u00a0(1968\u20131988) to follow the mathematical\u00a0Fibonacci sequence\u00a0and, for the Walker\u203as outdoor show\u00a09 Artists\/9 Spaces<\/em>, he built\u00a0Bridge Over Tree<\/em>\u00a0(1970), a 91-foot (28\u00a0m) long walkway with stairs that rise and fall over an evergreen tree.<\/p>\n

In 1974\u201375 he built more than 1,000 cardboard and balsa wood models of components of American\u00a0vernacular architecture\u00a0titled\u00a0Dictionary for Building<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 1988, he designed the\u00a0Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge\u00a0in Minneapolis, uniting two neighborhoods previously separated by 16 lanes of streets and highway.\u00a0Armajani expresses three basic types of bridge construction: beam (the walkway), arch (eastern side), and suspension (western side). He commissioned a poem by\u00a0John Ashbery\u00a0that is stamped into the bridge\u203as upper beams.\u00a0And in 1993, he built on one side in\u00a0Loring Park, the pavilion\u00a0Gazebo for Four Anarchists: Mary Nardini, Irma Sanchini, William James Sidis, Carlo Valdinoci<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Siah Armajani designed the\u00a0Olympic Torch\u00a0presiding over the\u00a01996 Summer Olympics\u00a0in\u00a0Atlanta,\u00a0Georgia,\u00a0United States, but later disowned the project\u00a0because the Olympic Committee failed to uphold their contract.<\/p>\n

He worked on other projects such as the\u00a0Round Gazebo<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a0Nice,\u00a0France,\u00a0the\u00a0Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room<\/em>\u00a0at the\u00a0Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst\u00a0in Frankfurt, and projects in\u00a0M\u00fcnster, Germany;\u00a0Battery Park City, New York; at\u00a0Storm King Art Center\u00a0in Mountainville, New York;\u00a0and at the North Shore Esplanade at the St. George\u2019s\u00a0Staten Island Ferry\u00a0Terminal in Staten Island, New York.<\/p>\n

Later career<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his later years, Armajani returned to his politically active roots.\u00a0His 2005 work,\u00a0Fallujah<\/em>, \u00a0is a modern take on\u00a0Picasso\u2019s\u00a0Guernica\u00a0but was censored in the U.S. due to its critical view of the war in Iraq.\u00a0It was recently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.\u00a0Seven Rooms of Hospitality<\/em>\u00a0is based on a conversation between\u00a0Jacques Derrida\u00a0and\u00a0Anne Dufourmantelle. Room for Deportees<\/em>\u00a0(2017) speaks out to the hard line, anti-immigrant policies that took over in the US and Europe.<\/p>\n

An exhibition at Muelensteen Gallery in 2011 presented a dozen of Armajani\u2019s 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\u00a0Shirt<\/em>\u00a0(1958), Armajani uses pencil and ink to completely cover his father\u2019s shirt in Persian script.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Minneapolis Institute of Art\u00a0holds several works:\u00a0Skyway No.2<\/em>\u00a0(1980), a 5-foot (1.5\u00a0m) mahogany and brass portal;\u00a0Mississippi Delta<\/em>\u00a0(2005-2006), a colored pencil on Mylar triptych picturing the aftermath of\u00a0Hurricane Katrina; and\u00a0An Exile Dreaming of Saint Adorno<\/em>\u00a0(2009), a cage-like inhabited tiny house or stage named for\u00a0Theodor W. Adorno.<\/p>\n

Armajani was the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions,\u00a0and his works featured in dozens of major exhibitions in the US and Europe.\u00a0Siah Armajani: Follow This Line,<\/em>\u00a0the first comprehensive US retrospective dedicated to the artist, was on view at the\u00a0Walker Art Center\u00a0September 9 through December 30, 2018,\u00a0and at the\u00a0Met Breuer\u00a0February 20 through June 2, 2019.<\/p>\n

Armajani died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27, 2020, at age 81.<\/p>\n

Awards and honors<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2010, he won a Knight Fellow award granted by\u00a0United States Artists.\u00a0In 2011, he was awarded Chevalier of the\u00a0Ordre des Arts et des Lettres\u00a0by the French government and received a distinguished artist award from the\u00a0McKnight Foundation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 10, 1939 – August 27, 2020 (taken from Wikipedia)   Family and education Siavash Armajani an Iranian-American sculptor and architect.was born on July 10, 1939 and passed away on August 27, 2020. He was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 in\u00a0Tehran,\u00a0Iran.\u00a0He attended a Presbyterian missionary school. He thought that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phart"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94786,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92043\/revisions\/94786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}