24 April 2023 For artist Sheida Soleimani, care is an art form and revolution is a way of life.
The Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani is standing between the back of her Victorian house and her adjoining art studio in Providence, Rhode Island, wearing a floor-length floral dress and leather work boots. The light outside is changing, and she suggests that we go and visit her crows before they fall asleep at sundown. They live in her wildlife clinic, “The Congress of the Birds,” in the basement.
As we enter, a joyous cawing begins. Three jet-black crows bounce with anticipation on a large sawn-off branch that stretches across the back of the space, partitioned off by heavy gauze. We step into their enclave and one hops immediately onto her arm. “Oh, you took a bath, huh?” she purrs. This one is named Zephyr, a female who gently cocks her head at me. “She’s curious about you,” says Soleimani, staring adoringly at the soft glossy feathers. “She is like my kid.”
As well as being an internationally celebrated artist who emphatically voices her pro-democracy, human rights activism, Soleimani is a federally licensed migratory bird rehabber, an all-encompassing pursuit that in her hands, some might say, echoes a devotion akin to motherhood. (She is child-free, and tired of being asked if she will reproduce—“I have so many animal children,” she says, “I do not want any of my own.”)
This fervent, no-holds-barred care follows a biological thread: her mother is a nurse, her father a doctor. They met while training at the same hospital in Shiraz, Iran. When the 1979 revolution came into effect—stripping women of their equal rights, suppressing free speech, banning any kind of Western cultural influence, razing the monarchy and ushering in a stringent Islamic law—their lives flipped into chaos. Any show of resistance was illegal and often met with violence, but they remained active, outspoken dissidents. Her mother was thrown into solitary confinement for a year (and had to send her toddler daughter, Soleimani’s older sister, away to live with relatives), and her father—arrested but then released—went into hiding, eventually escaping on horseback through the Zagros Mountains to Turkey, before finally settling in the U.S. (Soleimani’s mom and sister joined later.) While her father was able to continue practicing medicine, her mother was not. Instead, as a catharsis for her trauma, she began to take in suffering animals. Soleimani was born in 1990, in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a household thrumming with political discourse and wildlife.
Year-round, while teaching at Brandeis University and creating art, Soleimani tends to an endless succession of wounded creatures. These birds have been struck by cars, fallen off trucks on the way to the slaughterhouse, been abandoned by humans or simply lost their way. She takes them all in, often staying up through the night to minister to their needs, before releasing them. But the shadows of this work loom large: many die of incurable disease, or have endured terrible mistreatment, and she has to euthanize almost half of them. Local residents now reflexively call Soleimani instead of Animal Control. Her number is public, and her phone rings continuously.
On the day I visit, she first shows me the new outdoor coop that she and her partner, Jonathan Schroeder, recently built. It teems with ducks, chickens, quails, a rooster, a chukar patridge and a very striking polka-dot guinea fowl. We peek in at an injured hawk, sheltering alone in a large aviary. Soleimani is constantly aware of all the movements in the trees and the sky—very occasionally, healed birds come back to visit, especially if she looked after them when they were young, like the baby blue jays she rescued last year. She cannot resist expanding to domestic animals, which she adopts before watchfully rehoming them. I meet a Great Dane she has named Albatross, or Alba for short, and a shy, charcoal-gray cat to whom she talks lovingly in Farsi. She has just posted a photo of him to the Lost & Found Pets of Rhode Island Facebook page.
She admits to me that, recently, exhaustion has been setting in. “I’m so tired. I’m just burnt out,” she says. “Nothing particular has happened—it is compassion fatigue.” While her responsibilities are undeniably vast, her love for the birds is also indelibly connected to her parents’ suffering, caused by a ruthless regime that recently resurged and is also behind the death of Mahsa Amini, the young woman who, in September 2022, died in Tehran in police custody for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. The protests that erupted—and the brutality with which the government responded—have given rise to one of the most powerful women’s movements in recent history. Last December, Soleimani unveiled a new piece, Mahsa, for “Eyes on Iran,” a public art exhibition in New York featuring a group of fellow Iranian artists, presented by Hillary Clinton and held in tandem with the UN’s gender-based violence initiative. A gigantic photo collage, installed in the street on Roosevelt Island, depicts a woman’s outstretched hand holding a hijab on fire. Behind it are copies of Amini’s brain scans that were released anonymously to prove that she died of blunt force trauma to the head, and not, as the authorities claimed, of natural causes.
Portrait of Sheida Soleimani. Photo: Shana Trajanoska.
Soleimani’s voice and activism has a widening reach—she is represented by three top galleries, shows her work in solo and group exhibitions across the globe, and has regular speaking engagements. But her rage is unabated. What eases it? “I just want to cook dinner and spend time with the crows,” she says. “It’s the one reset button for me.” What would be the ideal? “I wish that the bird work wasn’t volunteer—that it could be a nonprofit, and I could still make my a t. I want to be an a tist first and foremost.”
Her studio is currently dedicated to “Ghostwriter,” an ongoing series of photo collages that addresses her family’s ordeal. Soleimani’s parents have already sat for several po traits. On the left wall is a print of one of her most recognized and shared works, Noon-o- namak (bread and salt), from 2021. Her mother poses, her face obscured to protect her identity, cradling a large polka-dotted bird. While I have already seen this image several times, I suddenly see it anew. The bird is a guinea fowl. Is it the one outside in the coop? “Yes, the same,” Soleimani says, explaining that her mother often spoke of one she cherished in Iran. By strange coincidence, someone had abandoned the one now thriving in Soleimani’s garden, and she rescued it, just as she was about to embark on this new project. “With ‘Ghostwriter’ I’m creating these jumps in history,” she says. “My mother had a guinea fowl ... and then some- one dumped one in my neighborhood. I’m creating a connective tissue between our two lives, through birds. The bird rehab is really because of my mom.”
In the back of the studio, a new installation is in mid-process. A whole wall and the ground in front of it are covered in large-scale, printed photographs, amounting to a landscape representation of Behesht-e Zahra, the largest cemetery in Iran. Smaller cutouts of textured paper resembling dirt are checkered throughout the backdrop, and the floor is sectioned out by cardboard borders. This piece is about her father. “Go ahead and walk around,” she says. I step carefully into it. “There are two sections of the cemetery—section 16 and section 23—which is where activists and protesters are buried,” she explains. “It is the most unkempt. It’s overgrown, and as you can see, some of the graves are broken or shattered.” Guerillas, even students, defile them. After being arrested, and to keep a low profile, her father took work there as the person who announces a second time of death—a procedural formality to make sure that the deceased is in fact dead before burial. With his menial pay, he bought a rug for his and his young wife’s apartment. “And that’s the rug,” Soleimani says, pointing to a small multicolor patterned carpet laid carefully over the cardboard sections.
Her parents brought very few belongings with them when fleeing Iran. Upstairs in her room, Soleimani keeps the suitcase her father carried. At first, she treated it like a museum artifact, only to realize that it was better to live alongside it, so, “I haven’t put it away,” she says. “I haven’t done anything with it. I look at it every day. I recognize it every time.” This is a deliberate gesture to extend her parents’ resolute attitude toward what happened to them, their insistent, unsentimental telling and retelling of their stories without censorship—all hallmarks of Soleimani’s own art. Her pieces function as emotional threads of these legacies, a different form of ghostwriting through layered tableaux of media and memory. In the storage room, a recently delivered, life-size, white-foam and fiberglass horse—as yet unassembled, in three parts—dominates the space. It’s going to be covered in hand-screened, printed fabric, a blue and green pattern, echoing the rug, “and my dad is going to ride the horse for a photograph,” she says. “The papier-mâché mountain is ready.”
Another major component of the new work is the drawings her mother made to address her past. “A big part of her life was making art, but I don’t think she saw it as anything more than a hobby,” says Soleimani, who has screened and enlarged many of her mother’s small sketches—gentle lines composed with a light touch, but an assertive eye. Subjects include creatures she drew for Soleimani as a child—sleeping snakes, cat-birds—and also, a sparking bomb, an imitation of one she’d seen in a Marxist publication her husband used to write for; and a baby in a jar, a distressing memory of her time burying Kurdish fetuses and stillborn babies under an orange tree to prevent them from being inhumanely discarded at the hospital. These stories and images were shared freely with Soleimani from the time she was young, in a matter-of-fact way. Humor, too, remains a potent force in the family. Her father would counter the Midwest racism they endured with, among other things, lawn displays of a zombie nativity scene for Christmas, or George Bush being lowered into a coffin for Halloween.
When Soleimani arrived in Providence in 2015, initially to work at the Rhode Island School of Design, she knew no one, a lonely callback to her childhood. Her parents—still vividly connected to their homeland, talking incessantly on the phone to family and friends, arguing loudly at the television and raucously debating politics at the dinner table—only spoke Farsi to her, and she did not learn English until kindergarten, by which time the otherness was too clear, her individuality chafing against assimilation. By her own admission, she was a feral kid. “I hung out in creeks and caught newts and crawfish and listened to bird sounds on tape.”
In the living room, sitting by a burning wood stove and potted tamarind, jasmine and cherimoya that her mother planted, I ask Soleimani if she has ever been to Iran. She shakes her head. She tried to go, a decade ago, but in the end her father told her that it was too dangerous. This was the impetus for her to channel her anger into political art. It was a turning point for a young woman who had been hounded by self-doubt in her 20s, rehabbing birds, collecting dead bugs and making little memento mori with them as artworks; she was known to everyone as “bird girl.” As an undergrad, she was shamed by a professor for liking Kiki Smith—not contemporary enough, apparently. “And so I threw all the animals away,” she says.
Her fears of not being successful or professional superseded everything else, but privately, hidden away at home, she gradually began rebuilding a few terrariums. Meanwhile, she would find herself at collector dinners, sharing bird facts to fill awkward silences. People were captivated. Curators began pitching stupid, fanciful ideas for bird-themed shows. She recognized how clueless most humans are about wildlife, and how harmful this can be—people call to tell her that they have attempted Reiki on a bird, or comforted creatures who don’t want to be touched. She has to euthanize many animals because of it. She links this to what she faced growing up—a pervasive lack of awareness about the Middle East. “I think people’s ignorance is a huge part of why I want to make the work that I do, as a form of education,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I’m a teacher too—it’s about providing an alternative context, or a way for people to absorb information.” She occasionally receives death threats from regime supporters who leave angry messages on her work voicemail. But as long as she is able to spread the word, she is countering the falsehoods perpetuated by the Iranian government.
The phone rings, and this time, it’s Animal Control calling her. They might have matched the rescued charcoal-gray cat to a photograph of one who was lost some time ago. She brightens at the idea of returning a pet to its owner. And if it’s not a match? “I might keep him,” she says.
