Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, sculpture, textile, community-based and participatory art
Website: taranehhemami.com
Taraneh Hemami was born in 1960 in Tehran, Iran, and moved to the United States in 1978 to study art, arriving just before the Iranian Revolution. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Oregon in 1982, and her MFA in Painting from the California College of the Arts in 1991, where she has taught ever since. She has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout her career as an artist, curator, and educator.
Her awards include a Creative Capital Award (2012), a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation (2012), a Kala Fellowship, a James Irvine Foundation “Visions from the New California” award (2004), a Creative Work Fund Visual Arts Award, grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the California Council for the Humanities, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as numerous private collections internationally.
Hemami engages diverse strategies — site-specific installation, glass work, sculpture, textile production, and collective and participatory projects — to explore themes of displacement, memory, preservation, and representation within the Iranian-American diaspora. Her work is often handcrafted, building architectural sculptures that become platforms for interaction: beaded curtains, shattered glass styled as traditional Muslim prayer rugs, laser-cut wool carpet maps of Tehran, and mirrored talars drawn from the historic gathering halls of Iran. By meticulously replicating government posters, propaganda, and banned print matter as handmade objects, she comments on tools of manipulation and persuasion used across nations and histories. Since 2007, her ongoing Theory of Survival project has functioned as a traveling archive-cum-residency program, gathering and responding to the historical materials of the Iranian Students Association of Northern California — active from 1964 to 1984 — through invited creative dialogue with artists, scholars, and communities internationally.
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