A Builder in Search of Home:
Remembering Siah Armajani (1939–2020)

By Victoria Sung

Aug 28, 2020

Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts

Siah Armajani, 1977. Photo courtesy the Walker Art Center Archives.

Victoria Sung, co-curator of Follow this Line, Siah Armajani’s 2018 retrospective, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, remembers the Tehran-born, Minneapolis-based artist, who passed away August 27 at age 81.

When I first met Siah Armajani, just a week after I had moved to Minneapolis to work at the Walker Art Center, he sat me down at a large wooden table in the center of his studio, looked at me sternly and said, “It is important to remember the verb ‘to be.’” Armajani was an incisive philosophical thinker and would frequently impart his metaphysical musings in the middle of an otherwise casual conversation. He once described the Persian language as an open door followed by a closed door, another open door followed by a closed door, ad infinitum. Years later an earlier moment of ontological questioning or a passing bon mot (“I like people, but only conceptually” was a favorite) would connect the seemingly far-flung nodes of a searching, allusive mind.

Over the next three years we would sit countless times at that same table for what became a familiar ritual: conversation over a cup of tea (and heaping bowls of strawberries, dates, and chocolate cake). Being, in the Heideggerian sense of what it means to be in the world, was the foundation of Armajani’s thinking, both in terms of his art and life. In the spirit of the German philosopher’s notion that to build is to dwell and to dwell is to think, Armajani was always building—whether tinkering in his studio with bits of cardboard and glue to make the hundreds of small-scale maquettes that comprise his seminal series Dictionary for Building (1974–1975) or designing the 375-foot long Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988) that connects downtown Minneapolis to the Walker. But for Armajani, building was more than an intellectual exercise: it was also a search for home. 

Armajani’s artistic career began in the late 1950s while a student studying philosophy at the University of Tehran. After the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup that ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Armajani joined the National Front resistance movement and produced political messages that opposed the shah’s rule. These “night letters,” translated from the Persian shab-nameh, contained slogans like “Mossadegh’s way” and “Independence is ours” on collaged pieces of paper, their small scale and lightweight nature lending to their circulability under the cover of night. Owing to Armajani’s increased, and increasingly dangerous, political activism, his father sent him to the United States to continue his studies. While he was able to leave the country, many others were not as fortunate and were jailed, tortured, and killed. The day he boarded the plane, he recalled, he could feel “the daggers of ten thousand eyes on [his] back.” Armajani would not return to Iran until 2005.   

Armajani emigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Macalester College, where his uncle Yayha Armajani was a renowned scholar and professor of history. The recent émigré’s impressions of his new country were varied and are captured in his monumental work on cloth Letters Home (1960). The 24-foot work incorporates his hastily written thoughts about Americans’ neatly manicured lawns and penchant for Coca Cola and, poignantly, their freedom from what he called “the weighty stone of history.” He noted that growing up in Iran, students would have to memorize thousands of years of history, yet his American classmates seemed to possess a willful forgetfulness that he found liberating. Years later, when he taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he’d joke that for his students “history was the last issue of Artforum,” a phrase he would repeat to me with a puckish look in his eye. 

Though still studying philosophy, it was at Macalester that Armajani began to engage with art with more seriousness. After a painting professor introduced him to monumental works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists, Armajani gained the confidence to pursue works on canvas, and at a larger scale, expanding on the small, Farsi script–covered works on paper he had made in Iran. “I found similarities between calligraphy and Franz Kline’s drawings,” he said. “I felt I had found my ground.” 

In 1962, while still a college student, Armajani submitted two works to the Walker Art Center’s Biennial of Painting and Sculpture, Prayer and Prayer for Sun (both 1962). The Walker paid $500 to acquire Prayer, the first work of Armajani’s to enter a museum collection. Over the next sixty years the Walker would build one of the most meaningful collections of Armajani’s practice to encompass more than 37 works, including his pioneering explorations in computer-generated film (1970) and his monumental sculpture Fallujah (2004–2005).

It was also at Macalester that Armajani would meet his fellow-classmate-turned-lifelong-partner, Barbara Bauer. Barbara is fond of telling the story of how she saw Armajani in a classroom and went straight to the registrar’s office requesting that she be enrolled in the same classes as the well-dressed Persian student with the afro. Barbara’s intuition, and initiative, paid off; the two married in 1966. They formed a formidable partnership: Siah was Barbara’s staunchest supporter in her successful career as a retail executive and Barbara Siah’s, in his unwavering pursuit of his artistic principles. Armajani always spoke with a twinkle in his eye when he talked about “Barbee.”

In the mid-1960s Armajani’s work took a conceptual and cross-disciplinary turn characteristic of artistic practices at the time: “I was terribly dissatisfied with … painting,” he reflected. “This dissatisfaction was based on the conclusion that there were certain ideas, not only philosophical ones, which could not be translated or expressed directly in the forms of painting and sculpture as they existed then.” Working with the Hybrid Computer Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s NASA-sponsored Space Science Center, Armajani’s artistic activities resonated with such programs as Experiments in Art and Technology and he participated in a number of landmark group shows such as Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1969) and Information  at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970). 

At the same time that Armajani began his explorations in art and science, he began investigating the intersections of art and architecture, creating a hybrid form for which he would become best known. Though built with tangible materials—often two-by-fours that were nailed together (Armajani liked to say that you could see how his works were constructed just by walking around them)—his architectural-sculptural models were at their core conceptual propositions. First Bridge (1968), built at full-scale in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, started at a height of ten feet before narrowing down to a height of four feet in a physical rendering of perspectival vision. The jagged proportions of Fibonacci Discovery Bridge (1968–1988) follow the mathematical sequence by the same name whereby each number is the sum of the previous two numbers.

Bridge Over Tree (1970), commissioned by the Walker as part of the outdoor exhibition 9 Artist/9 Spaces, was just as its title suggests: a bridge offering an impractical stairway up, over and down a triangle-shaped tree. Armajani recalled how environmental activists threatened to burn the bridge down if the tree died. The day before the opening, the show’s curator Richard Koshalek noticed the tree starting to brown and went out in the middle of the night to spray-paint it green. Armajani frequently shared outlandishly humorous stories like this one, at times seemingly apocryphal, but implausibly turning out to be true.

Some of his bridges functioned as much needed conduits from one place to another. Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988), which crosses sixteen lanes of traffic and is accessible by foot or bike, effectively knits together downtown Minneapolis and the Walker. According to museum lore, when the late director Martin Friedman commissioned Armajani to design a bridge he also prevailed upon the artist to choose a neutral color (harkening back to the industrial bridges once erected across the Mississippi and in the spirit of Minimalist sculptures at the time). Armajani insisted on a bright yellow. Both strong-willed, they eventually agreed on a pale yellow. But in the end, the artist had the final say. In 2018, alongside the opening of his career retrospective, Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, the Walker and Minnesota’s Transportation Department worked with Armajani to repaint the bridge according to his original specifications. 

In the following decades, Armajani would construct public commissions around the world, including in Münster, Germany, for Skulptur Projekte Münster; in Battery Park City, New York, in collaboration with Scott Burton and César Pelli; at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York; and famously, in Atlanta, for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games during which Muhammad Ali lit the artist-designed torch. For much of his career, Armajani was known as a pioneering public artist and was often quoted from his Manifesto: Public Sculpture in the Context of American Democracy in the service of art that is “open, available, useful.” Yet, his public works were characterized by what can be termed an uneasy hospitality. From his Gazebos for Anarchists series, which resemble carceral cells, to his reading rooms and meeting gardens, the physical experience of Armajani’s works is far from comfortable. With their upright seats and built-in lecterns reminiscent of rihals, or book stands on which to place religious texts for recitation, his constructions deny the reader any chance of leisure. Instead, they give form to a conception of democracy that depends on citizens reading, thinking, and doing the work to persuade their compatriots through the tools of oration and dialogue. A democratic society functions, Armajani argues, only as an active social and collective endeavor. 

As he got older, Armajani’s work returned to the outwardly political nature of his earliest works from half a century earlier. Fallujah (2004–2005) is a monumental sculpture inspired by Picasso’s Guernica and made in response to the Iraq War’s bloodiest battle. His latest series, Seven Rooms of Hospitality, is based on Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle’s Of Hospitality, a published conversation between the two philosophers that interrogates the ethics of hospitality and questions the possibility of “absolute hospitality.” Room for Deportees (2017) draws upon the familiar architectural-sculptural language of Armajani’s public works but speaks urgently to the folly of the nationalist, anti-immigration policies that have swept through the US and Europe, creating dangerously precarious and fatal situations for refugees and other migrants. Despite their formal dissimilarity, these works harken back to the punctum of his “night letters." As in Night Letter #1 (1957), Armajani’s latest works also seem to implore viewers to “Hear our cry!” 

Armajani could be demanding at times—but he demanded from others what he demanded of himself, and of all citizens, in his unshakeable belief in arts' potential to provoke civic engagement. As curator Ute Meta Bauer, who in 2019 organized the artist's first exhibition in Singapore, told me, “A silent and generous giant who defended ‘we the people’ has left us.”

I always liked to think of Armajani living on one side of the Walker and working on the other side (just five minutes in either direction), and I would imagine him passing by the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge on his daily commute. There is a sculpture in the Walker’s collection titled House to Work, Work to House Bridge (1969). The seven-foot bridge renders in physical form the changing perception of one’s route to and from home: even though one may cross the same bridge, the journey back is never the same. Armajani’s studio was the place where he found a sense of place, where he could be. He went to his studio until his final days. He will be deeply missed.