Siah Armajani, Paria No.1, 1957, Cardboard, paper, ink , watercolour on paper, 43.2 x 11.4 cm (17 x 4 ½ in)

Siah Armajani, The Way, 1957, ink, coloured pencil, graphite, string, wax seal, cloth on paper

Persian Period: 1955 - 1964

In August 1953 a coup d'état ended Mossadegh's government. Hope left and fear settled over Tehran. The coup d'état rehired the centuries-old inquisitors who tortured and killed people of the opposition. Fear lay under a thousand snows. The military thought they were fighting with millions of nobodies. They thought that the nobodies "experienced no terror, no exultation, no love.... That they do not sweat, feel hunger or suffer remorse." (Pete Hamill) Tehran became dark. Pitch black. There was silence. No talk of any consequence. Dead hush quiet.

During this time in Tehran I spent most of my time going to school and working for the National Front. As my good friend Abdoul Bazargan would put it, "we were two gophers saddled with menial jobs." We were taken much more seriously when we reached the university level. The rest of my time I spent walking around the city, and much of that was spent in south Tehran and around Tehran's main post office. South Tehran was a universe all unto itself. The language of south Tehran is Farsi, which is closed, ambiguous, embedded with allegory and metaphor and mixed with political, religious and social hints. The language of south Tehran is hasty and rushed sometimes leaving the syntax behind. Thousands of the dispossessed, downtrodden and oppressed were strangers in their own city as they had been made to feel diminished and insignificant. They were judged and condemned by others for the way they dressed, talked, walked and believed.

Siah Armajani, Tehran, 1956, Ink on paper and cardboard

Siah Armajani, Post Office, 1957, pencil, ink, and wax seal on paper

On the way to south Tehran you passed by the main post office. Two or three "scribers" would be seen sitting on the steps where people could hire them to write a personal letter to family, break a spell or write a special prayer for curing sickness. The scribers would also write letters of protection from Satan for travelers.

The works I made during the period 1957-1964 were pieces such as Sofre #1 (1957) and Wall (1958), which were influenced by a mixture of Persian miniatures and Persian folk fairy tales and by what I observed in the neighborhoods in South Tehran. The Night Letters are from 1957. The Night Letters were political expressions that were passed hand to hand in Tehran's "underground."

Siah Armajani, Wall, 1958, Ink, fibre, watercolour, twine on cloth, 41.9 x 77.5 cm (16 ½ x 30 ½ in)

Siah Armajani, Night Letter #1, 1957; watercolor, ink, wax seal on paper

Siah Armajani, Night Letter #2, 1957, wax seal, ink, pencil, watercolor, colored pencil, crayon on paper

My interest in politics was ignited by my grandmother, who was a cousin to Mirza Kuchek Khan Jangle. In my grandmother's youth Kuchek Khan was under siege in a rural province and my grandmother and her friends brought food and substance to aid his group and help keep morale strong. Her stories of being in danger of losing her life on a daily basis during this period were extremely influential to me.

The period of my works 1955-1964 culminated in paintings of simple script that used black ink on white canvas. I was not proficient in calligraphy nor did I particularly like it. I just took ordinary Persian script as my means of expression. From 1960 to 1964 most of my works evolved around Persian script, such as: Follow This Line (1959),Lock Key (1958), Shirt #1 (1958), Shirt #2 (1960), Hafez (1960), Prayer #1 (1960), Prayer #2 (1962), and Prayer #3 (1964).

Siah Armajani, Shirt, 1959

Siah Armajani, Shirt, 1959

Siah Armajani, Golden Shirt, 1960, Oil on canvas, 81.9 x 125.7 x 5.1 cm (32 ¼ x 49 ½ x 2 in)

Siah Armajani, Prophet Ali, 1963, ink and lithograph on paper

Mrs. [Abby Weed] Grey's collection was purchased from artists who had shown at the American-Iranian Society in Tehran and no other artists were included. I remember urging Mrs. Grey to expand her collection to include opposition artists to the regime, like Tudeh, the Toilers and the like, so she would have unbiased art of that era. She would then have been able to claim her collection to be representative of that period. I had great admiration for the rank and file of the Tudeh and Toilers parties. I had many friends among them and learned much from them. They even had their own official licenses and permits for their internal use only. For instance, the Tudeh Party "marriage certificate" used black and red ink on white paper, as did the posters from the Toilers Party (Maleki's Party). These posters were filled with Farsi script and ghostly images of farmers and factory workers.

I had never met an Iranian artist until 1961, when I met sculptor Parviz Tanavoli. I had also never seen any contemporary Iranian art until 1962, when I saw Mrs. Grey's collection of contemporary Iranian art in her home.

Siah Armajani, Baba nan darad (Daddy has bread), 1960, Ink, waxed seal, and string on canvas, 51 x 19.5 cm (20 x 7 ¾ in)

Siah Armajani, Father Has an Apple, 1958, water color and ink on cloth, 28.3 x 7 1/2 in.

Siah Armajani, Father Has a Pear, 1958, water color and ink on cloth, 22 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.

Siah Armajani, The Hinge, 1963, Mixed media, 30.5 x 30.5 cm (12 x 12 in)

Siah Armajani, Dictionary of Numbers, 1957

Originally published in Siah Armajani, 1957-1964, exh. brochure (New York: Meulensteen Gallery, 2011). The dates of the "Persian period" have been amended by the artist in this reprint.
Text by permission of Rossi & Rossi. Photos with courtesy of Rossi & Rossi.

Siah Armajani

Siah Armajani (1939-2020) was an Iranian sculptor who worked in the United States for six decades. Forced out of Iran in 1960 by the antidemocratic movement, Armajani focused on architecturally scaled sculpture inspired by literary and political themes. His artwork ranged from public sculptural commissions, such as the 1996 Olympic torch and the Staten Island tower and bridge, to smaller, more intimate works on paper. Throughout his career, his goal was to link different kinds of structures with their political, philosophical, and ethical implications.

Although much of his early work focused on utopian themes, often linked to the United States, Armajani focused more heavily on Iranian subject matter in recent years. In 2009 the Meulensteen Gallery exhibited his large cage-like sculpture Murder in Tehran, dedicated to the memory of a young activist, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot during a protest of the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that year.

In 1996 Lannan Foundation commissioned Armajani to create The Poetry Garden for the courtyard of its Los Angeles museum. When the Foundation moved to its current location in Santa Fe, The Poetry Garden was dismantled. In 1999 Lannan Foundation made a gift of the original sculpture to Beloit College. In 2007 the Foundation purchased one of Armajani’s most innovative works, Fallujah, a multilevel glass structure built to commemorate Pablo Picasso's 1937 antiwar painting Guernica, which the artist compared to the death and destruction of the Iraq War. The piece was shown at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2007 and was then gifted to the Walker Art Center, where it remains in the permanent collection; Lannan Foundation possesses a version of the piece in model form.

Armajani’s work is represented in some of the most celebrated collections around the world, such as the British Museum and the Guggenheim, and has been featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2011 he was awarded both the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and the McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. He lived and worked in Minneapolis.

Armajani’s epic drawing Written Minneapolis (The Last Tomb), 2014, an homage to his hometown of Tehran, depicted his home of Minneapolis. This felt-pen-on-Mylar drawing measures 36 inches high by an impressive 222 inches long. In a love letter to both his hometown and his adoptive home, Armajani portrayed Minneapolis with its vernacular architecture and an air that is distinctly midwestern. Created on a specially made tilted work space in his studio, the scroll-like drawing is rich with shading and detail, all created using text written in the artist’s native Persian. Of this work, Armajani wrote:

"Among the works in this exhibition is Written Minneapolis (The Last Tomb), 2014. It is 18 feet long and a mix of writings and drawings of the neighborhood of my place of work.

At the end of the nineteenth century and into the first two decades of the twentieth, this part of Minneapolis was developed to be used for warehouses and light industry. By now, the neighborhood has morphed from its early years of grain elevators into a mixed use of storage houses, residential, and crisscrossed with railroad tracks, some useful and some useless.

Written Minneapolis (The Last Tomb) is a crooked memory of my childhood and adolescence in Tehran, and then later on after I came to Minneapolis. Empty spaces were filled with poetry that I had to memorize as a student…some Persian and some impromptu translations by my teacher of French symbolist poets."