Siah Armajani Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1939 - d. 2020

Siah (Siavash) Armajani (10 July 1939 – 27 August 2020) was an Iranian-American sculptor and architect known for his public art.

Siavash Armajani was born into a wealthy, educated family of textile merchants in 1939 in Tehran, Iran. He attended a Presbyterian missionary school. He thought that his grandmother was the influence that started his political activism. He began his art career making small collages in the late 1950s, visually mirroring Persian miniatures and political posters, to spread his vision of democracy and secularism and to publicize his party the National Front.

After the monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi came to power, in order to protect him, his family ordered him overseas in 1960. Armajani immigrated to the United States, where his uncle, Yahya Armajani, was chair of the history department at Macalester College. There he studied art and philosophy, making Saint Paul, Minnesota, his permanent home. He met his wife at Macalester and he and Barbara Bauer married in 1966. He became an American citizen in 1967