Location: San José, CA
Medium: Printmaking, installation, drawing
Website: panteakarimi.com
Pantea Karimi was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, and has been based in San José, California since 2005, having previously lived and studied in England. Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, her education in science and art was entangled with religious indoctrination — an experience that became central to her practice. Her grandmother was an herbalist, her mother a history teacher, and her father a mathematician and architect; these three intellectual inheritances — botany, history, and geometry — run through everything she makes.
Karimi holds two Master's degrees, in Graphic Design and Fine Arts, from Iran and the United States, as well as a printmaking degree from the United Kingdom. Since 2014, she has conducted sustained research into medieval Persian, Arab, and early modern European scientific manuscripts at institutions including the British Library, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, MIT, and the UCSF Library. She is the 2019 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate, a 2024 City of San José Creative Ambassador, and the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant (2022). Her work is held in public collections at Stanford University, the University of California San Francisco, the University of California Davis, and the permanent collections of the Cities of Palo Alto and Berkeley.
Karimi works across print, installation, drawing, video, animation, sound, and virtual reality. Her practice is built around the intersection of art, science, and history — specifically, the visual language of medieval Islamic scientific manuscripts and the ways that knowledge, gender, and cultural heritage have been marginalized or erased over time. She extracts imagery from ancient texts on medicinal botany, mathematics, optics, astronomy, and cartography, then translates these into large-scale contemporary installations that are at once scholarly and deeply personal.
Her work carries two intertwined threads: a celebration of Iranian intellectual and artistic heritage, and a critique of its suppression — by colonialism, theocracy, and Western cultural hegemony alike. Recurring motifs include botanical silhouettes, geometric Islamic patterns, lunar diagrams, and objects of religious veneration, reframed as sites of resistance and reclamation.
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