Shiva Ahmadi

Shiva Ahmadi’s practice borrows from the artistic traditions of Iran and the Middle East to critically examine contempo­rary political tensions. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1975, Ahmadi came of age in the tumultuous years following the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. She moved to the United States in 1998, and has been based in California since 2015.

Ahmadi works across a variety of media, including water­color painting, sculpture, and digital animation; consistent through her pieces are the ornate patterns and vibrant col­ors drawn from Persian, Indian and Middle Eastern art. In her carefully illustrated worlds, formal beauty complicates global legacies of violence and oppression, addressing political machinations, the horrors of war, and their effects on innocent lives. Since 2015, Ahmadi has been concerned with the escalating refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe and, more recently, the plight of detainees at the US-Mexico Border.

Shiva Ahmadi studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; and Azad University, Tehran, Iran. In addition to recent solo exhibitions at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI (2020); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); and Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2014), Ahmadi has been included in group shows at the Orlando Museum of Art, FL; Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY; New York Historical Society, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar. Her work is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Farjam Collection, Dubai, UAE; TDIC Corporate Collection, Abu Dhabi, UAE; and the pri­vate collection of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, among others.

Ahmadi has been awarded the ‘Anonymous Was A Wom­an’ Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (both 2016); and a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy (2018). Shiva Ahmadi, a hardbound mono­graph of her work, was published in 2017 by Skira.