Farairan’ Choice Hadieh Shafie

Love and Talisman

Born in 1969 in Iran and immigrated to the United States in 1983.

EDUCATION:
2004 MFA Imaging and Digital Art UMBC, MD
1999 MFA Painting Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1993 BA Painting University of Maryland, College Park, MD

GRANTS & AWARDS:
2011 Jameel Prize, V&A Museum, London, UK Shortlist
2011 Franz and Virginia Bader Fund, Washington D.C.
2010 Individual Artist Grant, Maryland State Arts Council
009 Mary Sawyers Baker Award, William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund
2008 Individual Artist Grant, Maryland State Arts Council

SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2011 Hadieh Shafie, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (Upcoming)
2010 Some Kind of Love, Jean Efron Art Consultants, Washington D.C. (Current)
2009 Paper Pattern Color Culture, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2008 Exodus, The Carriage House, Baltimore, MD
2004 The Little Black Fishes, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD
Spin, MFA Exhibition, Center for Visual Art and Culture, UMBC, Baltimore, MD
2000 Taste, UMBC, Baltimore, MD
1997 Speak + Sound + Touch, East Hall Galleries, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1996 September Promises, MFA Thesis Exhibition, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
Eshgeh, Higgins Hall Gallery, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2011 Hadieh Shafie, XVA Gallery, Dubai, UAE (Upcoming)
2010 Ritual: Form, Script and Gesture, A Pop Up Project, Amy Morton Fine Art, Washington DC
Crazy Beautiful II, Kenise Barnes Fine Arts, Larchmont, NY
More of the best is yet to come, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Sondheim Prize, Semi‐Finalist Exhibition, MICA, Baltimore, MD
MICA Sondheim Prize and Baker Award Honorees, Casewerks Baltimore, MD
I(RAN) Home (In America), CoCA, Seattle, WA
Gallery Artists Group Show, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2009 Hidden Wounds, Paper Bullets: Iranian Contemporary Art, Grant Arts Central, California State University at Fullerton CA
I (RAN) Home (In America), The Fridge DC, Washington D.C.
Cross‐Currents: Trends in Contemporary Art Media, Sarah Silberman Gallery, MontgomeryCollege, MD
Protocol: Syntax / Semantics, Gallery 4, Baltimore, MD
Baker Artist Awards Exhibition, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Women’s Work, Civilian Art Place, Washington D.C.
Bastakiya Art Fair, Saatchi, Dubai, UAE
i‐Annual Symposium on Media Arts, Delaware College, Delaware, PA
Hand to Frame/Surface to Lens, MSAC Gallery, Baltimore, MD
Penned, Traveling Exhibition, Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC
2008 Drawing Fusion, CCBC, Catonsville, MD
Hidden and Revealed, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD
Full Circle, Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD
Penned, Pinkard Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
2007 Iconology, Red Saw Gallery, Newark, New Jersey
Changing Climate Changing Colors, Abrons Art Center, New York, NY
2006 The Notebook, Current Gallery, Baltimore, MD
Displacement, Pyramid Atlantic, Silver Spring, MD
2004 Solace: Searching for Meaning in a Time of Distress, Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C.
2003 Under The Table and Dreaming, Raleigh Studios, Baltimore, MD
2002 Solace, Open Studio Exhibition, Raleigh Studios, Baltimore, MD
2000 Thirty‐Feet of Wisdom, University of Maryland Baltimore County, MD
1999 30 x 30, Cinque Gallery, New York, NY
Summer Show, Center for Iranian Modern Art, New York, NY
998 Art of the Book, Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn, NY
1997 Now and Here, Steuben Gallery West, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1996 Women, East Galleries, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1995 Art Made in Exile: Iranian Artists, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Contemporary Iranian Artists, Avicenna Center, Vienna, VA

ARTIST TALKS:
2010 Some Kind of Love, Jean Efron Art Consultants, Washington D.C.
2009 Baker Artist Awards, The Hamilton Club, Baltimore, MD
Women’s Work, Civilian Art Place, Washington D.C.
2008 Negotiating Times: An Exploration of Culture, Politics and Identity by Artists from Pakistan,
Iran and Tunisia, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York, NY
007 Emergence, Current Gallery, Baltimore, MD
2006 Displacement, Provisions Library, Washington, D.C.
2004 Solace: Searching for Meaning in a Time of Distress, Middle East Institute,
ashington D.C.
Spin, RTKL Public Lecturer Center for Visual Arts and Culture, UMBC, Baltimore, MD
2004 The Little Black Fishes, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD
2004 Children’s Workshop: The Little Black Fishes, School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD

PUBLICATIONS:
“Issue #88,” New American Paintings, The Open Studio Press, Boston, MA, 2010
“Emergence,” Exhibition catalogue, Current Gallery, Baltimore, MD, 2007
“Siouxsie,” Link Journal on the Arts, Issue No. 10, Baltimore, MD, 2004

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Emily Warner, “paperpatterncolorculture” The Brooklyn Rail, (November, 2009)
Richard Chang, “Iranian art at Grand Central in Santa Ana”, The Orange County Register (November 20, 2009)Richard Chang, “Iranian art offers window to changing world”, The Orange County Register (November 16, 2009)Lavanya Ramanathan, Gallery opening of the week: “I RAN Home at the Fridge” in SoutheastWashington, Washington Post, (November 13, 2009)Maura Judkis, “ I RAN Home (in America)”, Washington City Paper, (November 11, 2009)
Stephanie Merry, “ Art I Ran Home (In America)”, Washington Post (November 4, 2009)
Mike Unger, “Baker Artist Award Winners at BMA” About.com, (May 26,2009)
Michael O’Sullivan, “In Baltimore, Artists Win a Vote of confidence” Washington Post, (May 22, 2009)
Victoria Donohoe, “New Media Exhibit” The Philadelphia Inquirer, (April 10, 2009)
Edward Gunts, “Baker Artist Awards Names Winners” The Baltimore Sun, (March 25, 2009)
Bret McCabe, “Moving Pictures Exhibition Exploring Transforming Images Also Recasts
Their Emotive Potential” Baltimore City Paper, (February 25, 2009)
Ellyn Weiss, “Wright, Shafie, Cabazon and Tan at Civilian Art Projects” eweissart.com
Robert Jason Fagan, “Hand to Frame/Surface to Lens” Exhibition Catalogue, (February, 2009)
Robert Jason Fagan, “Drawing Fusion” Exhibition Catalogue, (October, 2008)
Mike Guiliano, “MAP‐ing Out How We Figure In” Baltimore City Paper, (August 14, 2008)
Bret McCabe, “Visions of Excess: Information Overload Trumps Demur Artfulness”
Baltimore City Paper, (August 20, 2008)
Kate Noonan, “Full Circle” An Artscape Exhibition, Baltimore City Paper (July 23, 2008)
Alex, “Full Circle” Then There Where Ten Tigers, (July, 10, 2008)
Hadi Gharabaghi, “Where is the friend’s house?” Iranian.com (October 19, 2005)
“Iranian Artist in Exile” Payvand Iran News, Washington, D.C. (July 30, 2004)
Associated Press, “Iranian‐American Artists Focus on Exile” AP Washington, D.C. (July 29, 2004)
Carl Hartman, “The Poignancy and Pain of Exile” AP Washington, D.C. (August 8, 2004)

Works in Collections:
Bank of America, Corporation Collection, North Carolina
Art in Embassies, Public Collection, Dubai, UAE
Private Corporation Collection, London, UK
Private Corporation Collection, Hong Kong

After completing her BA in Painting at the University of Maryland, Shafie moved to New York in 1993 to live and to study painting at Pratt Institute, where she graduated in 1999 with an MFA in painting. Shafie presented her first video installation titled Spin in 1995 and a year later she showcased her thesis titled September Promises which was like weaving the Farsi word eshgh (love) in the shape of a scroll. Shafie’s work to date is the continuation of the same principles of repetition and the exploration.

In her statement she says in this regard:

A constant element of my work is the significance of repetition, process and time. In works comprised of paper scrolls, individual strips of paper have been marked with the word “eshghe,” both hand-written and printed in Farsi. While the most direct translation of “eshghe” to English is “love” its expressive power is “passion.” I chose this word because it encompasses my longing and search for acceptance and understanding. The repetition of text, in particular the word “eshghe,” is a recurring element in much of my work of the last decade. Using concentric forms of text and material I seek to magnify its meaning. Writing by hand on strips of paper, I repeat what is printed, filling in gaps to emphasize a particular, existing form. For each work I decide on a limited color palette. As I roll the paper the colors on the edges of the strips align, creating bands of alternating hue that stand along side one another, while at once, seeming to merge into new color formations which are often delightful surprises. I may decide to repeat the color sequence but I try to encourage myself to let go so new combinations may arise. Placing each scroll side by side, I make decisions about color and composition at every step of the work and so the process of making progresses much like a painting or drawing. What interests me is the tension between control and spontaneity that emerges at every step. During the repetitive process of adding paper strips to create individual scrolls, text and symbols are hidden within these concentric rings of material as the scroll grows outward. There are compositions of printed and handwritten text sealed in the work that sometimes I wish I could see again, that are now relinquished to the eternal turning within the work.

Concentric forms of text and material also take inspiration from the Sama dance of the whirling dervishes with the resulting work as the physical expression of my awe.

Shafie left New York in 1999 after accepting a fellowship at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County and began to focus on performance and video art. She completed her second MFA degree in Fine Arts in Digital Media in 2004.

Shafie’s design sensibility and intuitive grasp of color theory are strong. As geometric abstraction alone, her scroll pieces make dynamite eye candy.

But it is the work’s conceptual underpinning that gives it its real charge. By Shafie’s own admission, there’s a certain obsessive-compulsiveness to their making, revealed in her numerical titles (e.g., “11800”), referring to the number of paper strips that went into making each one.

Though Shafie’s earliest scroll pieces contained paper so tightly coiled that it was impossible to read what was written on it, her most recent works are less . . . hermetic. Though the artist typically begins a scroll by wrapping the paper around a knitting needle — making it impossible to read what’s inside it — in several of her latest works she has used dowels as thick as shower curtain rods, creating a more interesting and varied rhythm of tight and loose circles. Those loose circles, where you can finally see a little bit of the writing that’s inside them, make her art more of an open book.

The repetition of a key like shape can be found in varying degrees throughout Hadieh Shafie’s work. The image of a key is often symbolic for unlocking the secrets to something great, possibly unlocking the mystery of Hadieh Shafie’s motifs. This might be partially true, however, Shafie’s main reason for incorporating this particular emblem relates to the fact that “eshghe” in script resembles that of a skeleton key. In certain paintings, such as “Radiate In” and “Radiate Out”, Shafie illustrates this symbol so many times it becomes an abstract pattern, adding a rhythmic quality to her work. Hadieh Shafie likens her repetitive process to a ritualistic performance, such as prayer, made tangible.

Hadieh Shafie’s fascination with the sheer method of making art stems from her Iranian heritage. The elements of repetition and time are ingrained in Islamic art and craft as well as the Sama dance of the whirling dervishes (also echoed in the artist’s use of concentric shapes). Shafie’s palette is as breathtaking as her intricate designs. The vibrant hues of orange and pink that comprise “Still of the Turn” and the rich maroon used in “Keep on Turning” are quite spellbinding. And the interesting facets of Hadieh Shafie’s work are seemingly endless. For instance, the number of paper scrolls contained in an individual painting makes up the title of the piece. For example, “1890” contains that precise amount of cylindrical rings of paper.

Shafie’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions and she has been the recipient of grants from the Kress Foundation, RTKL and MSAC Individual Artist Grant (2010 & 2008) and the Mary Sawyers Baker awards from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009) & Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (2011). Most recently Shafie was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize (2011).

May her scroll of love and sama continue…

Sources:
Michael O’Sullivan Art review: Hadieh Shafie at Morton Fine Art, 2011
Tara Heuser, The Sweet Turning of the Page, 2009
mortonfineart@gmail.com