By Shiva Balaghi, December 2008 “People moving along Tehran’s Pahlavi Avenue (now renamed Vali-‘Asr Avenue) in 1960,” recalled Parviz Tanavoli, “would have seen a gigantic sculpture on the balcony of one of the apartments that overlooked the street. Constructed from scrap metal, this assemblage depicted a man embracing a deer. The deer’s antlers were made […]
By Shiva Balaghi, December 2008 A textured black background merges into two abstract spheres—one layered in cold hues of blue and white, the other in warm hues of ochre and brown—evoking a night sky that contains within it the celestial bodies. Closer inspection of the surface of Siah Armajani’s painting Prayer for the Sun (1962) reveals […]
How did a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner” residing in St. Paul, Minnesota, come to donate over two hundred works of modern Iranian art to New York University (NYU)? Indeed, this group of works—part of The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at the Grey Art Gallery—constitutes the largest public holding of […]
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Cartographies. With texts by Paulo Herkenhoff, Ivo Mesquita, and Justo Pastor Mellado. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1993. Rooted Visions. With texts by Carla Stellweg, Teresa del Conde, Andrés de Luna, and Gobi Stromberg de Pellizzi. New York: Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1989. Sullivan, Edward J. “Nahum Zenil’s Auto-Iconography (‘Mexican-ness’ […]