Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

She worked and studied in the U.S. until 1957, studying dance with Martha Graham, and hanging out with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers. When she was making ends meet working in the Bonwit Teller advertising department, her co-worker and friend was Andy Warhol.

She returned to Iran following her marriage to Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian, and the couple were social mainstays in a high time for Iranian art. They hosted the Kennedys, entertained visiting curators, and exhibited extensively in her country and even in the Venice Biennale. She had forged her own form of geometric abstraction, one based in both Islamic tradition and Modernism.

Everything changed with 1979 Iranian Revolution and the crackdown that followed. Stranded in New York, their home was confiscated, her artwork destroyed. It would be another 25 years before she could return. She’s in her 90s now, and thanks to eased censorship and political reform, she’s still working.

In 2014 a major exhibition of her work was organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Portugal and traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2015.

Thanks to those exhibitions, she’s been internationally hailed by the media, the critics, and the gallery-going public. A documentary was made of her amazing life, and early on in that film, she established her unassuming tone. “I’m just a person with a good eye who happens to work with mirrors.”