During his decades-long career, Siah Armajani has produced a nuanced and wide-ranging body of work that includes sculpture, public art, painting, drawing, and conceptual projects. He is best known for outdoor gardens, gazebos, plazas, and bridges, works that exist at the intersection of art, community, and site and explore what the “public” in public art really means. Less known are his studio sculptures, which combine social and political content with forms adapted from the vernacular architecture of rural America, Bauhaus design, and Russian Constructivism, among others. All of his works speak directly to an American experience of immigration—something Armajani, as a native of Iran and now a resident of Minnesota, knows well.
Early Life, Education
Armajani was born in 1939 into a highly educated family in Tehran, Iran. He was educated at a Presbyterian missionary school, where he studied Western philosophers such as Socrates, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Emerson and had his first exposure to American history. In 1960, he immigrated to the US to study at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he majored in philosophy.
Early Life, Education
Armajani began making art in the late 1950s while still in Tehran. His small collages from this period are formally indebted to Persian miniatures and folk tales as well as the dense design of political posters he saw around the city. During the early 1960s, he covered canvases, shirts, and other surfaces with lines of poetry in Persian Farsi. The Walker Art Center’s Prayer (1962) is formed of fragments of poems by Rumi and Hafez, which Armajani transcribed by hand to make a dense, cumulous pattern. His use of text as image reflects the practice of using Koranic quotations as integral decorative elements in Islamic art and architecture, and also represents the young artist’s response to the Abstract Expressionist gesture after learning about the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and others, in college.
Conceptual Projects, North Dakota Tower, Fifth Element
Later in the decade, Armajani turned to science, technology, and mathematics as a way to address ideas that he felt could not be expressed in painting. His proposal for A Fairly Tall Tower (1969) was a theoretical study for a self-supporting tower that would extend 24,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. For North Dakota Tower (1968), he calculated the height of a structure that would be tall enough to cast a shadow across the entire state. Fifth Element (1971), commissioned for the Walker’s exhibition Works for New Spaces, was a gold-leafed metal column that hovered between the ceiling and floor by means of a custom-made electromagnetic device that counteracted the pull of gravity. These and other works explored many of the ontological and metaphysical themes that have continued to inform his work.
Limit Bridge #2, Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, Public Art
His interest in mathematics, engineering, and ontology expanded from these conceptual projects to include models and full-scale versions of bridges that invite viewers to situate their bodies in space. Fibonacci Discovery Bridge (1968/1988) represents in the form of a wooden bridge the Fibonacci number sequence, in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers (each section of the bridge gets progressively longer). Limit Bridge #2 (1973) is one of a series of ideas for bridges that have been made impassable by structural blockages or dead ends. Other bridges allow for passage. His Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge is a 375-foot painted-steel structure that connects the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden with the urban oasis of Loring Park, making it possible for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross the busy streets below. Its sections combine three major bridge types: suspension, arched, and closed steel trestle.
In his “Manifesto: Public art in the context of American democracy,” Armajani states that public art “should not intimidate or assault or control the public. It should be neighborly. It should enhance a given place.” This philosophy has guided such projects as a bandstand in Mitchell, South Dakota, a Floating Poetry Room outside Amsterdam, a waterfront plaza in lower Manhattan, and a covered walkway for the headquarters of General Mills in Golden Valley, Minnesota. All these works, and others, spring from his mission to make public art that is essentially democratic: open, available, and useful.
Studio Sculptures, Dictionary for Building, Glass Room, Fallujah
Concurrent with his public projects, Armajani has made numerous studio sculptures that parse the language of domestic architecture. The Garden Gate (1982–1983) and Closet under Dormer (1984–1985), for example, both from his Dictionary for Building series, are intentionally provocative disharmonies of form and function that are still, somehow, comfortably familiar. Glass Room (2000), a mobile space containing a chair and a folding cot, is a similarly peculiar, nonfunctional mix of elements that nevertheless beckons one to enter.
During the past two decades, much of Armajani’s sculptural work has become overtly political. Fallujah (2004-2005), is a monumental anti-war monument that repurposes motifs from Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica in response to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. In his recent series Seven Rooms of Hospitality (2015–ongoing), Armajani directly addresses issues of forced migration and the current global refugee crisis.
Recognition
Armajani’s work has been exhibited and collected by numerous museums in the US and abroad. In 2011, he was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and the McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. He lives and works in Minneapolis.
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