Maryam Safajoo is a Tufts University alumni. She is a Persian-American painter based in Champaign Illinois and graduated with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. Her paintings narrate the stories of the contemporary situation of the systematically persecuted Iranian Bahá’í community – Iran’s largest religious minority – after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Her paintings narrate these stories which are a result of her conversations with the people who were near these actual events. Many of the incidents she depicts only exist in the memory of those who experienced them and have no pictorial existence. In many cases if visual records did exist, they have been confiscated by the Iranian authorities in raids of homes. Her depictions are often the first time these events have taken visual form.She records the details of this history. For example, the shoes, clothes, artifacts, and environments seen in her paintings are very close to those that were there in the event.
Online:
