Artist Talk: Siah Armajani

"Reading is a civic act. As much as we are suckers for the oral, the written word manages to constitute a social body in ways too often lacking today: a rigor in terms of focus, a polyphony of voices." In conversation with designer Aryn Beitz, the Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars discusses its contributions to the Siah Armajani: Follow This Line exhibition and catalogue, both of which strive to attain what it claims Armajani has mastered: the ability to engage and create a public by suggesting reading, without actually requiring it.

Using her father's 1979 passport as a touchstone, US-based Iranian contemporary art scholar Golnar Yarmohammad Touski looks at the recent history of the country artist Siah Armajani left behind when he moved to Minnesota in 1960 and the cultural and political realities faced by Iranians working internationally in the arts today.

Weekend travelers to downtown Minneapolis this month will meet an impasse on Interstate 94, marked by an ominous sight: all lanes of traffic closed and the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge—crossing from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden to Loring Park—encased in plastic. Here's what's going on.

On the occasion of John Ashbery's passing on September 3 we share audio of the famed poet reading his Walker-commissioned poem, a site-specific meditation on movement, place, and order that since 1988 has graced the 375-foot expanse of Siah Armajani's bridge over the interstate highway.