Leila Seyedzadeh’s Woven Landscapes Go on View at Shangri La in Honolulu

Leila Seyedzadeh, an Iranian artist based in New York, is showing "Birds in Search of Blue Expanses" at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art in Honolulu, Hawai'i Public Radio reports. The exhibition, in the museum's Moroccan Gallery, brings together painting, weaving, sculpture and poetry with historic pieces from the collection, among them a Persian carpet and fragments of tiles, some from Isfahan. Woven paintings hang from the ceiling like mountains and water and change as the visitor moves. Seyedzadeh painted single threads before weaving them. The centrepiece was made partly in New York and partly in Hawaii and travelled folded in a suitcase, which she likens to her life as an immigrant. She learned dyeing with indigo, pomegranate peel and turmeric from her mother in Iran. She grew up among the mountains around Tehran and has not been home for nine years. The show follows her residency at Shangri La in February. Its title changed after she saw a native white-tailed seabird fly close to an active volcano. "I'm carrying my homeland within me," she says. The curator is Navid Najafi. The exhibition runs until February 2027.

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