Marketing Agency, with Sheida Soleimani
Portrait by Shana Trajanoska
Sheida Soleimani (شیدا سلیمانی) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist, as well as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Born in Indianapolis, she grew up in the 90s, raised as a Marxist atheist in the Bible Belt. Her parents arrived as Persian political refugees, having escaped oppression related to their pro-democratic activism during the ’79 Iranian Revolution. Since then, Sheida has become a widely respected artist and community organizer; she recently participated in a talk right here in East Providence, at Odd-Kin as part of the FABRIC Arts Festival. We talked about art, birds, and life.
The Well (TW): Hello! You got any wild stories?
Sheida Solemani (SS): Lots.
TW: Hah, okay. We’ll start with the basics and see where this goes. What was growing up in the Midwest like?
SS: It was wild. It's a beautiful place to grow up, but being a Middle Eastern kid post-9/11 made it really difficult. By virtue of refusing to make nice with their neighbors—think of being the only people of color in a midwest farm town filled with corn and soybean fields—and in many ways refusing to assimilate, my parents introduced me to principles and beliefs that I aspire to in my life and my work: speaking frankly to power, rallying around difference, and confronting ignorance and misrecognition.
TW: Can you give a specific example or two?
SS: One Halloween during the Iraq War, my dad briefly became notorious for constructing a scene involving George W. Bush in a casket. Another memorable moment from childhood was when Touchdown Jesus—a really large foam sculpture of Jesus with his arms out in front of him, built in front of a mega-church—got struck by lightning and caught fire. My baba saw it on the local news right after it happened, and we drove to go see its burning remains. My baba has a booming laugh and cackle; I can hear him laughing with joy to this day in my memory, as we all watched Jesus burn. A few years later, he was 'resurrected' and rebuilt again, much to our dismay.
TW: Very goth! Your family’s been involved in your art practice recently, we’re thinking of the Ghostwriter work.
SS: Working with my parents is amazing. We're all really close, and so much of who I am is informed by them and all of the stories they have told me. When we work together, we bounce ideas off of one another. My maman will help pose my baba, or help me build the backdrops. My baba will always question my maman and I about our 'intention' and if it is coming across in what we are making. I feel really lucky that they are so supportive and so into being a part of the process.
Above: Young Sheida with a baby raccoon. “This is what rehabbing in the 90's looked like. This photo is an example of what not to do. Please do not attempt to cuddle wild animals or allow your children to do so ;) ”
TW: That’s great, it sounds like a real point of pride.
SS: [I am] really proud of the work I have been making with my parents. Also really proud and excited to be building my passion and work as a wildlife rehabilitator into a full blown organization. I feel the most proud when I can release a bird that I treated back into the wild where it belongs.
TW: What’s your official title when it comes to bird work?
SS: I am the Executive Director of Congress of the Birds, the state's only wild bird rehabilitation clinic and release center. We just got our non-profit status this year, and are gearing up to build a bunch of enclosures on 42 acres of land that were just donated to us. Last year, we took in over 1,500 birds, and this year I think we'll have over 2,000.
TW: What’s the process of getting a Federal Migratory Bird Rehabilitation Permit?
SS: Long! And really intense! I've been a rehabber my whole life, but I've been state permitted in RI since 2015. The federal permit is a really intense application that requires a lot of prior certifications and permits, as well as letters of support from rehabbers and vets in the field. It was not an easy permit to get!
TW: And where’d you get the 42 acres?
SS: We were really lucky to get a private donation from someone who is passionate about the work we are doing with rehabilitating the birds. It came as a total surprise! I was completely shocked when the donor approached us about it, but am so grateful to be given the space to release the birds we rehabilitate.
TW: Before the birds are in your care…where are you finding them?
SS: My phone number is public, so when someone finds an injured bird, they can easily find my info online and call me. I give them instructions on how and where to drop off the bird to our clinic for care. I'm getting around 50 calls or so a day at this point!
A lot of my getting to know Rhode Island's every single little corner has been through bird rescues. Notable bird rescues in EP include an adult Osprey that was in an industrial park on the water, a Double Crested Cormorant near the Henderson Bridge, and a Common Grackle with a broken wing hiding under a car off of Anthony Street.
Above: Dissident from Ghostwriter
TW: How do you think about these two practices—art making and wildlife rehabilitation—in relation to one another?
SS: I think all three facets of my practices are part of my world that I have built for myself—I don't differentiate being an artist or rehabber or professor from other things in my life/world. Foraging and cooking, making dumb stuff out of clay, collecting records, hoarding plants. Those are all just extensions of my base interests. I guess one thing many people don't know is that I am a classically trained violinist who left the conservatory because it had too many rules.
TW: What about early on in life...when did you start making things you understood to be art?
SS: I remember thinking I was making “art” when I was taking my first film photography class in high school. At the time, I was super obsessed with the concept of memento mori and time. I wanted to tell a story, which I never had really thought about doing visually before, and I made a tableau photograph of a wall clock that I placed a large dead moth on. The shadow of the moth was covering some of the clock, obstructing most of the numbers—it was very angsty, but I had this whole 'time is running out' thing going on at the time. It was exciting to feel like art could tell a story.
TW: Storytelling is still very central to your practice—even when abstracted, it’s rich in narratives. This is a big question for limited space but, what are you primarily concerned with conveying?
SS: Finding clever ways of seducing viewers to engage with a work is something I think is especially important in the art world, which is so profit-driven and so prone to turning a blind eye to entrenched inequality. In sweeping away the West’s blinkered, Orientalist view of the Middle East and centering the spectator’s gaze on actual ongoing drivers of injustice and inequality, I seek to put in the aesthetic hot seat those who continually evade the scales of justice. At the same time—and this is getting back to repair and care—I am just as concerned with giving the marginalized (including the non-human) visibility and agency within my work.
TW: When you’re creating a series like Medium of Exchange, do you start with pure research (OPEC email leaks, international press), or by playing with images and finding stories as you go?
SS: I always start with research before coming up with an idea. All of my images are inspired by specific events—historical, political, familial—and those events are always the jump off point. I then get to learn more about those events through different forms of research- whether those be visiting archives, reading documents, or transcribing and translating oral histories. From there, I start creating sketches and think about what objects and images can be put together to tell the story I am trying to portray. Once I build up my tableaus (days to months depending on the composition), I photograph everything, and the photograph serves as the final piece.
Above: From Medium of Exchange. Photo: GDP, Angola
TW: We like to ask artists how they’re getting by financially—is that cool?
SS: I've always had to work to make a living, and have had some really rough times in my life. One year while teaching adjunct, I was buying expired medical equipment on eBay—I'm type one diabetic. [Today] I'm lucky to have a solid job, and just got tenure at Brandeis University where I am an Associate Professor. My art pays some bills for sure, but I can never rely on it as a steady income as someone with a chronic illness, so I'll be teaching for the rest of my life. Thankfully, I also love teaching, so that helps. Basically, a stable job with university health insurance is much better than expired meds on eBay.
TW: What’s something you’ve learned by teaching, or from students?
SS: When I started teaching at age 25, I was really young. I made friends with many of my students, and while I value those friendships immensely now, I realize that distance is needed to be a good and fair educator, and one that can create distance between work and life.
TW: Teachers always have great reading lists—give us some assignments!
SS: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
TW: Has any of your work in education, art, or with birds led to travel? Any notable trips that made an impact?
SS: I travel often, and to many different 'far away places.' I'll go with the most remote. Visiting the Lofoten Islands in Norway was one of the most remote places I have ever been, and we visited during the winter months for my birthday. I was hoping to see the aurora, and on the last night, I got to see the green and orange lights 'dancing' in the sky during a solar storm.
TW: What’s something you’re currently aspiring to?
SS: Maybe one day I'll learn how to leave time for self care. Until then, I rule my life by my baba's motto, “Comfort = death.”
TW: Readers, now for something a bit different.
Sheida has a GoFundMe page up to support her effort to build an avian release center for Congress of the Birds. Below, we’ve excerpted some info from that page.
Help Build an Avian Release Center for Congress of the Birds
Above: Getting ready to examine an injured Great Horned Owl, photo by Jessica Rinaldi for The Boston Globe, via GoFundMe
Congress of the Birds has expanded rapidly in the past year, becoming a 501(c), training over 50 volunteers, receiving over 2,000 avian patients and getting 42 acres of secluded woodlands in Chepachet. Their organization runs 24/7; they never turn away an injured or orphaned bird, and volunteers pick up birds from around the state. Now, they need your help!
A release center means that rehabilitated patients will have the best chance of success once released into the wild. To create a center, the Congress needs to build aviaries and flight enclosures that help birds build up their pectoral flight muscles—without proper conditioning, a bird may not be able to survive if it’s “hard-released” into the wild. In other words, they get to practice flying and acclimate to their habitat before going out on their own.
The Congress is not state funded and has no institutional or corporate donors. This project is relying exclusively on donations from the community and, this is big: every dollar donated is being 100% matched by a private donor. Read on and consider chipping in to help this project—and its patients—take flight.
