Shiva Ahmadi Works | Bio | Press | Exhibition views
Iranian-American, b. 1975
Lives and works in the Bay Area, California
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.
In addition to solo exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; and Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, Ahmadi has been included in group shows at Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Qatar; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. In January 2024, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, where Ahmadi has taught since 2015, will open a solo exhibition of her work.
Ahmadi’s 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; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.
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.