Cultural Initiatives in North Africa
and the Middle East
Cultural Initiatives in North Africa
and the Middle East
Monir Farmanfarmaian, née Monir Shahroudy, (born January 13, 1923, Qazvin, Iran—died April 20, 2019, Tehrān).
Iranian artist who was known for transforming Persian pictorial language into Modernist forms through her mirror mosaics and geometric drawings that bore witness to her cosmopolitan perspective, informed by a life journey that encompassed Persian culture and the Western art world.
Through her studies abroad, she combined traditional Iranian techniques with Western geometric abstraction to create unique and culturally ambiguous paintings and objects. Born in Qazvin, Iran in 1924, Farmanfarmaian studied Iranian art early in her life until moving to New York in the late 1940s, further studying at Cornell University, Parsons School of Design, and the Art Students League. She became an important fixture of the New York art scene, befriending important painters such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell. After a 20-year exile following the Islamic Revolution, Farmanfarmaian moved back to Iran in 1992, where she lived and worked up until her death on April 20, 2019. Her intricate glass, mirror, wood, and metal tessellated compositions have achieved widespread recognition and critical acclaim, resulting in awards such as a gold medal at the 1958 Iranian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her works are held among the collections of important institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.