17 Facts About Siah Armajani

Siavash "Siah" Armajani was an Iranian-born American sculptor and architect known for his public art.

Siavash Armajani was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 in Tehran, Iran.

Siah Armajani thought that his grandmother was the influence that started his political activism.

Siah Armajani began his art career making small collages in the late 1950s, visually mirroring Persian miniatures and political posters, to spread his vision of democracy and secularism and to publicize his party the National Front.

Siah Armajani immigrated to the United States, where his uncle, Yahya Siah Armajani, was chair of the history department at Macalester College.

Siah Armajani met his wife at Macalester and he and Barbara Bauer married in 1966.

Siah Armajani taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1968 until 1979, where he met Barry Le Va, who introduced him to Conceptual art then practiced in New York City.

Siah Armajani participated in Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1969.

In 1970, Siah Armajani contributed two works to the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Information: first, A Number Between Zero and One, a 9-foot high column filled with computer printouts of individual decimal numbers; and second, North Dakota Tower, a proposed spire 18 miles high and 2 miles wide calculated to cast a narrow shadow over the entire length of North Dakota from east to west.

Siah Armajani expresses three basic types of bridge construction: beam, arch, and suspension.

Siah Armajani commissioned a poem by John Ashbery that is stamped into the bridge's upper beams.

Siah Armajani designed the Olympic Torch presiding over the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, but later disowned the project because the Olympic Committee failed to uphold their contract.

Siah Armajani worked on projects such as the Round Gazebo in Nice, France, the Sacco and Vanzetti Reading Room at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and projects in Munster, Germany; Battery Park City, New York; at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York; and at the North Shore Esplanade at the St George's Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Staten Island, New York.

Siah Armajani's 2005 work, Fallujah, is a modern take on Picasso's Guernica but was censored in the US due to its critical view of the war in Iraq.

Siah Armajani was the subject of more than 50 solo exhibitions, and his works featured in dozens of major exhibitions in the US and Europe.

Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, the first comprehensive US retrospective dedicated to the artist, was on view at the Walker Art Center September 9 through December 30,2018, and at the Met Breuer February 20 through June 2,2019.

Siah Armajani died of heart failure in Minneapolis on August 27,2020, at age 81.