About

Maryam Taghavi is an Iranian-Canadian artist and educator based in Chicago. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the recipient of The New Artist Society Scholarship. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Taghavi has exhibited her work widely, including the recent commission A Spell for Passage, permanently installed at O’Hare International Airport Terminal 5, Chicago, and her solo exhibitions Chicago Works: Maryam Taghavi, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and A Leap Has No Return, Blanc Gallery, Chicago, all 2024. Taghavi has had additional solo and group shows at institutions such as LAXART, Queens Museum, Museo Ex Teresa, Chicago Cultural Center, EXPO, Driehaus Museum, Chicago Artists Coalition, The University Club, and Sazmanab Gallery, among others. Taghavi has received numerous awards and grants, including support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the 2022 Artadia Award. Her artistic practice has garnere national and international recognition. Her debut solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art is currently touring across Canada, with its final stop in London in 2026. Her work has been featured in prominent publications such as Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, e-Flux, Canvas, Chicago Magazine, and NewCity, where she was included in the "Artists’ Artists" Top 5 list. Additionally, she was featured in PBS's American Masters series, with a documentary on her practice premiering at the Chicago Film Festival in 2024. Since 2019, she has been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, serving as a Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Practices, an Advisor for the Graduate Division, and more recently expanding her teaching to the Arts Administration Department.

Maryam Taghavi's interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, rooted in a deep fascination with how language shapes perception and cultural memory. As a bilingual artist and native Persian speaker, she abstracts written text to convey meaning beyond legibility, disentangling linguistic forms from their intended function. Her work employs scale, color, and material to facilitate optical experiences that resist linguistic categorization. Central to her exploration is the Persian concept of Tamsha, an embodied form of seeing rooted in movement and spatial awareness, which transforms perception into an experience of inhabiting language and space. This focus on embodied vision bridges physical and metaphysical worlds, prompting reflections on the intersections of language, perception, and cultural memory.

In her recent work, Taghavi draws on the medieval Persian tradition of attributing subjectivity to plants, connecting this poetic worldview to contemporary environmental anxieties. By recontextualizing symbols from past times and places, she brings them into dialogue with present-day concerns, creating works that resonate across temporal and cultural boundaries.

Her meticulous process involves tracing letterforms, diacritics, words, and symbols, digitally reproducing them in a manner akin to stenciling. This technique detaches these forms from their original contexts, allowing new material and spatial associations to emerge. These forms transcend mere communication, becoming tactile and weighty elements that embody belief systems and psychological dimensions. By transforming language into three-dimensional objects and spaces, Taghavi creates ecologies that oscillate between the known and the imperceptible, imagining spaces that exist between matter and spirit. Her work becomes a site where the complexities of diasporic memory—displaced, fragmented, resilient, joyful, and held together by prayer—are not only remembered but reimagined.

contact: maryam@maryamtaghavi.com