Siah Armajani

Born Tehran, Iran, 1939

Armajani was sent by his family in 1960 to study philosophy at Macalester College, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, for political reasons. His early influences were Persian poetry, Iranian vernacular art and Persian miniatures. Armajani was a painter from 1956 to 1964. He became a sculptor in 1964 and began a movement which came to be known as Public Art. He published its first Manifesto in 1973, which has since been translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Persian. He has built seventy-six projects of Public Art as bridges, gardens, parks, poetry gardens, lecture and poetry rooms and gazebos throughout the United States and Europe. Among them are the Lannan Poetry Garden in Los Angeles, the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis, the 1996 Olympic Bridge and Tower in Atlanta, the Staten Island Tower and Bridge in Staten Island, New York, bridges in Stuttgart, Leipzig and Strasbourg, and recently a Floating Poetry Room for Amsterdam. In 2007 the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO), Geneva, presented a retrospective of his works from 1956 to 1960.