Siah Armajani: Follow This Line

Drawing inspiration from poetry and philosophy, architecture and mathematics, politics and contemporary life, Siah Armajani (b. 1939) is the subject of a major survey co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The catalogue Siah Armajani: Follow This Line, developed in close collaboration with the artist, is the most comprehensive publication dedicated to his 60-year career to date.

In Tehran, children walking home from school would scrape their pencils against the city’s walls, tracing their paths and enjoining one another to “follow this line.” In the spirit of this gesture, the exhibition Siah Armajani: Follow This Line asks visitors to follow the artist across a shifting terrain, beginning in 1950s Iran and ending in the present-day United States. Though Armajani is best known today for his works of public art—bridges, gazebos, gardens, reading rooms—located across the United States and Europe, this groundbreaking presentation centers on his studio as the site of a rich and generative practice. His artworks, at once abstract and political, engage a range of references: from Persian calligraphy to the manifesto, letter, and talisman; from poetry to mathematical equations and computer programming; from the Abstract Expressionist canvas to American vernacular architecture, Bauhaus design, and Russian Constructivism. To follow the line is to explore Armajani’s visionary proposals for both the physical world and the realm of ideas.

Published to accompany Armajani’s first US retrospective, this fully illustrated catalogue includes previously unpublished texts as well as a chronology of the Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist’s life and work. Contributions by Nazgol Ansarinia, Sam Durant, Barbad Golshiri, and Slavs and Tatars speak to his influence on a younger generation of artists based in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Edited with text by Clare Davies and Victoria Sung. Text by Nazgol Ansarinia, Jadine Collingwood, Eric Crosby, Sam Durant, Barbad Golshiri, David Hodge, Valérie Mavridorakis, Slavs and Tatars, Hamed Yousefi, and Siah Armajani.