Dyed handmade paper in artist frame

Aryana Minai makes paper-based sculptures and wall works that are intimately linked to philosophies and histories of architecture, migration, labor, the body, and the handmade. Minai identifies paper as a material that links storytelling, tradition, and craft, centering her practice on the diasporic subject’s daily lived experiences as she draws from her personal archive of decontextualized Iranian-American content. The architectural quality of Minai’s works embody a lived survival instinct—to preserve historic space and inhabit safe spaces—as well as an interest in what salvaged and saved materials can teach us. Using bricks and stones from buildings that no longer exist, woodblocks used a generation ago to create textile patterns, parts of vernacular decorative architecture, Minai embosses into paper that she pulps from found materials in her studio. Minai envisions architecture as a living entity that continually sheds and acquires memories as bodies pass through its spaces.

Minai received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2016, an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.