Farima Fooladi
What Corners Hold, 2026
Acrylic, graphite, and pencil color on wood
This work is painted within a circle, a form without corners. Yet I have always beendrawn to corners—in buildings, in cities, and in language. In Persian, the word for curiosity, konj-kāvi, literally means "searching the corners." For me, painting begins there, with a place that seems ordinary until I spend time with it. The circle becomes a way of looking closely, allowing memory, history, and imagination to gather within asingle view.
Artist bio
Farima Fooladi was born in Tehran, Iran, during the transition from monarchy to the Islamic Republic and theocracy. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Fooladi is an assistant professor of studio art at the University of Texas at Austin and received herMFA from Pennsylvania State University.
Her recent work examines the shifting relationship between architecture, landscape, memory, and displacement. Drawing from experiences across Iran, the United States, and the Arctic, her paintings trace how political, environmental, and personal historiesbecome embedded in the built environment.
Fooladi is the recipient of the 2024–2025 MacDowell Fellowship, Lawndale's 2024 The Big Show Award, juried by Dr. Laura Augusta, and the 2023–2024 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She was a 2023 Artists on Site Resident at the Asia Society Texas Center, where she expanded her research into migration and space. In 2026, she was an artist-in-residence at the Spitsbergen Artists Center in Svalbard, Norway, where she developed a new body of work exploring environmental change, geological time, and the shifting landscapes of the Arctic. Her work has been exhibited nationally andinternationally and is included in public collections, including the Houston Airports Civic Art Collection.
@farimafooladi
