News Release: Sculptor Siah Armajani receives McKnight 2010 Distinguished Artist Award

June 28, 2010 - Artist behind the Whitney Bridge has made a worldwide career of connections.

The McKnight Foundation has named Minnesota-based sculptor Siah Armajani as the 2010 McKnight Distinguished Artist, in recognition of artistic excellence spanning more than five decades. Now in its 13th year, the annual honor includes a $50,000 cash award and recognizes individual Minnesota artists who have made significant contributions to the quality of the state's cultural life.

Best known today for his public art and sculptures worldwide, Armajani moved to the United States from Iran in 1960. Nourished by Early American vernacular architecture, much of his work reflects upon American democracy — as realized or idealized — referencing environmental contexts and architecture, while paying homage to leading poets, philosophers, and thinkers. In addition to sculpture, Armajani also creates two-dimensional works in colored pencil, representing some of the clearest aesthetic ties to his country of origin, through stylistic traditions of Persian miniatures. Among his works in Minnesota, Armajani designed the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge which links the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden with Loring Park.

"Siah Armajani is one of Minnesota's great assets, an ambassador to the world," says Kate Wolford, president of The McKnight Foundation, "One fundamental role of great art is to help us interpret and understand our world. Never shying away from reality as he sees it, Siah shines a spotlight on life's challenges and inequities. He unites humanmankind's hardest truths with the optimism that we can do better, if we acknowledge and understand the bridges that brought us here."

Armajani has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MAMCO, Geneva; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kunsthalle Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Tate Britain, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; "Documenta 8," Kassel, Germany; and the 39th Venice Biennale. He also recently created "Between the Lakes" at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2005); "Fallujah" (2004-2005), a modern take on Picasso's "Guernica," first shown at Museo Artium, Alava, Spain; and "An Exile Dreaming of Saint Adorno" (2009), currently on exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Other notable projects include commissions to design the Bridge, Tower, and Cauldron (1996) Centennial Olympics, Atlanta; New York's "Lighthouse and Bridge" (1996), Staten Island; "Three Skyway Bridges for City of Leipzig" (1997); "Bridge/Ramp for the City of Stuttgart" (1994); and "The Beloit Fishing Bridge" (1997). 

In 2009, Armajani created the installation "Murder in Tehran," exhibited at Max Protetch Gallery, New York. Inspired by a protestor's death following the presidential elections in Iran on June 12, 2009, the work depicts an ominous black structure on a pile of ground glass with castings of dismembered hands. At the show's opening, many young Iranian artists declined to be interviewed by Voice of America, which broadcasts underground radio in Tehran, Iran. Of the exhibition and the young artists' response, Armajani told ARTnews, "It is a very, very crystal-clear case of a barbaric regime taking over a country of 70 million people."

Armajani was born in Tehran in 1939, the son of a successful merchant. First through the Presbyterian Elementary School Mehr and then the ecumenical Alborz High School, Armajani and his three siblings were exposed to Western ways as well as Iran's traditional Islamic culture. He says he always knew he was going to be an artist. In the late 1950s, he first experimented with modern art through written fragments he created in Persian writing, infused with more contemporary aesthetics. After arriving in the U.S., Armajani continued making use of the written word as his graphic medium, covering fabrics and clothing with Iranian poetry. In 1963, he received his B.A. in Philosophy from Macalester College in St. Paul.

As the 1960s came to a close, Armajani became interested in conceptual art, for its flexibility to embrace both writing and theoretical reflection. Within the decade, he participated in a number of group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio. Throughout this period, Armajani explored the architecture of bridges and houses in sketches and scale models. In later years, he broadened this study to include communal spaces. Even now, these early explorations continue to serve as the basis for many of his public installations and projects.

In 1968, Armajani chose to officially define himself as a "public artist." Since then, much of his work has developed in and for public spaces: footbridges, benches, reading rooms, gazebos. In each, aesthetics unite with function; observers of his creations are often also users of them as well. According to design periodical Art Tattler: "His art is more about others and its contribution to the person in the experiment of his or her freedom or freedom of thought... His works are bridges, with a clean purpose as well as a metaphorical purpose of establishing linkage or holding together."

Armajani himself has said he wants to create "neighborly" sculptural spaces — spaces in which people can gather, confront, and exchange with one another. From bridges to houses, he studies structure, relationships between inside and outside, and the experience of his viewer-participants. According to Janet Kardon, art historian and author of Siah Armajani: Bridges, Houses, Communal Spaces, Dictionary for Building, "Armajani's houses are not houses but functions of their properties."

Often a metaphor for passage, Armajani's early conceptual studies of bridges eventually led to his full-scale commission for the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988), Minneapolis, which crosses 16 lanes of highway and allows foot traffic between the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden and Loring Park. In the piece, Armajani incorporated three types of bridge structure: beam, arch, and suspension. Underscoring transitions between them, he painted each half a different atmospheric shade: pale blue on the upward arch, and yellow for the inverted arch. Running in each direction across the upper lintel of the bridge are the words of American poet John Ashbery, reflections on movement, place, and passage, commissioned by Armajani specially for the bridge.

Often installed in public spaces, many of Armajani's works are thoughtfully inscribed with the written word. According to the artist himself, "All buildings and all streets are ornaments... [giving] a place to the representational arts of poetry, music, and performing."

ABOUT THE MCKNIGHT DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD
The McKnight Distinguished Artist Award recognizes individuals who helped lay the foundation for Minnesota's rich cultural life. Despite opportunities to pursue their work elsewhere, they chose to stay — and by staying, they have made a difference. Previous recipients are composer Dominick Argento (1998), ceramic artist Warren MacKenzie (1999), writer Robert Bly (2000), choral conductor Dale Warland (2001), publisher Emilie Buchwald (2002), painter Mike Lynch (2003), orchestra conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (2004), sculptor Judy Onofrio (2005), theater artist Lou Bellamy (2006), sculptor Kinji Akagawa (2007), writer Bill Holm (2008), and theater artist Bain Boehlke (2009).
 
The McKnight Foundation will honor Armajani at a private dinner later this year.

ABOUT THE MCKNIGHT FOUNDATION
The McKnight Foundation seeks to improve the quality of life for present and future generations through grantmaking, coalition-building, and encouragement of strategic policy reform. Founded in 1953 and independently endowed by William L. McKnight and Maude L. McKnight, the Minnesota-based Foundation had assets of approximately $1.8 billion and granted about $98 million in 2009.