In Conversation: Arghavan Khosravi & Minoo Emami
March 27, 2024 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm Griswold House and Live streamed on Vimeo
Join us for an illuminating conversation with exhibiting artists Arghavan Khosravi and Minoo Emami, Dr. Francine Weiss, the Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs & Chief Curator, and Cheryl Hatch, Newport Bureau reporter for The Public’s Radio. Khosravi and Emami draw on their experiences in Iran– where they were born and raised– for artistic inspiration. Their evocative works juxtapose patterns, found objects and painting that speak to broader issues of women’s freedom and agency, the private and public self, home, the ravages of war, and existence under a dominant and oppressive regime.
Free.
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Meet our Guests:
Arghavan Khosravi’s studio practice mobilizes visual art as a vehicle for cultural transformation. She investigate the aesthetics of ancient Persian miniature paintings, which were originally used to illustrate folkloric texts. Typically, the only women they portray have a subservient or secondary role, lacking agency and social significance. Khosravi’s paintings take a conscious look at how the value system transmitted by that iconography continues to shape Iranian gender politics today.
Arghavan Khosravi earned an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design after completing the studio art program at Brandeis University, a BFA in Graphic Design from Tehran Azad University and an MFA in Illustration from the University of Tehran. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, is represented in many permanent collections and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships.
Minoo Emami is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist with over 25 years dedicated to art practice, teaching, and exhibition. She was a self-taught painter when she moved to the U.S. and began her formal art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in January 2015. She earned a BFA from Tufts University in May 2019. Minoo received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in May 2021.
Minoo is the recipient of the SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship in 2023, the Hanse Sculpture Garden Grant by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2020, and the SMFA Biot Award in painting in 2016. She is the Indigo Arts Alliance Mentorship Resident in Portland, Maine, in 2024.
Cheryl Hatch, Newport Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio is a multi-lingual storyteller with a broad background in journalism as a reporter, photographer and educator with extensive international experience. Early in her career, Cheryl focused her camera and reporting on war, its aftermath an its effects on soldiers, their families and those caught in the crossfire, especially women and children. She has worked in Liberia, Somalia, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Eritrea. In the winter of 2011-2012, she embedded with the 1/25 Stryker Brigade Combat Team 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment in Afghanistan.
Cheryl is a recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She documented the lives of women, including former fighters, in her project: A Luta Continua: Eritrean Women Defending National Borders and Defining Gender Boundaries. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the Sony Gallery in Cairo, Egypt and the Leica Gallery in Solms, Germany. Her work has also been published in newspapers and magazines, including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Paris Match.