It was midwinter, and there were a couple of feet of snow on the ground when graphic designer Maryam Hosseinnia and her mother moved to the Twin Cities from their native Tehran in the early ’80s. She started senior high school that year, attending Richfield High for their ESL program. When asked whether she had any trouble making the transition between cultures or if she faced any prejudice, she explains: “I never had a bad experience, myself. But talking to my other Persian friends… everyone has wildly varying experiences. At first, the culture shock was hard, but I was brought up during the Shah period, so I had had exposure to European culture.” It’s no surprise, under these circumstances, that Hosseinnia’s artwork is itself a cultural collage, with unexpected juxtapositions reflective of her Persian heritage and western education.   Maryam went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for Graphic Design, and after she graduated with her undergraduate degree, she decided to move back to Tehran for work. “I moved to Boston briefly, but no one was hiring. Around this time, in 1993 and ’94, import and exports had just opened up again in Iran. With that came a boom in advertising, marketing, and graphic design in Tehran. A whole marketing language, a visual vocabulary for graphic design, was being developed. It seemed a really good opportunity.”     She worked for an ad agency there for a year or so, and describes the return home to Iran as, in many ways, more difficult than her initial immigration to the U.S. “I was in Iran during the Revolution, and I was there for the changes—uncovered hair for women to covered, co-education to segregated schools. I was there for the curricula changes in school from a secular program of study to a more Islamic focus. So I was prepared for what it would be like when I moved back.” And, as you’d expect, she was intensely interrogated when she returned because she was coming from the US. That said, she describes her experience working in graphic design in Tehran as a creatively stimulating time. Working within the strictures of Iranian government regulations as well as ordinary client considerations forced her to think resourcefully about design, and especially about relating clear visual messages. “In Tehran, I would not only need to please the client, but anything created would go through a government approval process as well. For example, by law we were not supposed to use female figures of any kind in our designs. And while that’s hugely limiting, it also pushes for more metaphorical and conceptual design. I found those challenges often made for more creatively interesting campaigns, because we were forced to think beyond the obvious marketing vocabulary to get our messages across.”   Over time, she was hungry to continue her education and broaden her technical skills, so she returned to the U.S. in the late ’90s to pursue her graduate degree in Design. Soon after graduating, she was offered a teaching position in Graphic Design at the University of Minnesota in Moorhead. She’s been pleased and gratified in her new role, and has been especially pleased to pursue personal art for its own sake. “The remoteness of Moorhead from that busy urban environment is focusing me inward, forcing me to really think about what my voice is.”   The strain of straddling the very different cultures of Iran and the U.S. has become the centerpiece of Hosseinnia’s personal work. “I have two passports and dual citizenship . I feel a tension between my Eastern and Western identities. Nowadays , the irony is, I’m being interrogated more intensely when I return to the U.S. than I am when I go to Iran. Last time I returned to the U.S. from a trip to Tehran, right after the bombing in London, I was checked into the private room in customs, simply because I had come from Iran. There’s no question: this political climate is particularly uncomfortable in both countries. It definitely creates some confusion for me sometimes, and that shows up in my personal projects.”   Her pieces consistently reflect a fragmentation of identity, drawing upon elements of both cultures freely, incorporating them, sometimes piecemeal, into artwork that feels like a loose confederation of cultural ideas and icons. Certainly, there’s anger and a sense of displacement evident in Hosseinnia’s work, but that challenge never overshadows her invitation to dialogue. Rather, there’s candor and even generosity in Hosseinnia’s best pieces, as she works through her struggles to fit before our very eyes and invites the audience into an intimate conversation about humanity, identity, and what it feels like to belong.

--Susannah Schouweiler

Maryam Hosseinnia's mnartists.org homepage

Maryam Hosseinnia's personal website
See Maryam's full portfolio of graphic design work and personal artwork.

Susannah Schouweiler on mnartists.org

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