About
Somaya Etemad is an American artist born and raised in Iran and now based in Los Angeles. She left Iran in 2011 after several personal and political misfortunes -- notably the sudden loss of her father when she was 14 and being jailed temporarily for publishing a political cartoon -- and generally to escape the regime. Trained as an architect at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Etamad has returned to fine art to explore deeply personal themes through visual storytelling. Her work applies architectural precision to imaginative, emotionally charged metaphorical scenes that bridge memory, identity, and place so as to reflect her experiences as a woman, mother, and immigrant. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, notably in London and all over southern California.
To view Somaya Etamad's work and learn more, visit www.somayastudio.com.
Artist Statement
I am an Iranian American artist. I left Iran in 2011 after facing a harsh social and political environment, including time in jail for a cartoon I drew. At age 14, the sudden loss of my father in a car accident left a deep and permanent wound that continues to manifest in my work. The series I continue to work on explores the key places I’ve lived and key. experiences I've had since his passing, from the isolation of immigration and poverty to divorce, motherhood, the pandemic, and the birth of my second child.
My architectural background weaves through each painting, shaping whimsical, layered scenes of memory and survival. Mushrooms, growing quietly in the dark, appear throughout as symbols of resilience. In Persian culture, qarch are seen as nature’s hidden gifts, appearing after rain and representing hope in harsh conditions. In my work, they stand in for myself, growing through art.
SOMAYA ETEMAD: A FUNGIBLE LIFE
By Peter Frank
Of the realms of art and of awareness, the biographical and the mycological do not seem the most likely to share a border (much less a porous one). We do acknowledge the remarkable presence of mushrooms, toadstools, puffballs, and all things kingdom funga throughout our biosphere. What kind of thing – especially so humble a thing -- nourishes us, poisons us, liberates our minds, or inspires our imaginations more dramatically? No wonder the familiar mushroom form occupies such a prominent place in our collective imagination, delicious, deadly, and distorting,
The prevalence of mushrooms in the pictorial (as opposed to architectural) work of Somaya Etemad provides that work a childlike insouciance – up to a point. Etemad is not a children’s book illustrator (although she has the skills and playfulness to be one). Such tales as she limns – she “tells” them less than she infers them – are in fact hard-bitten recollections of loss and terror, displacement and disillusion, at least as much as they are conjurations of comforting memories. The good, such as it is, with the bad – it’s all history for Etemad, but driven by the knowledge, the experience, that that history is at least as much “now” as it is “then.”
In her finely wrought pictures, some seemingly more woven than drawn, Etemad wanders restlessly (and often reluctantly) from place to place, situation to situation, environment to environment, looking for a berth, somewhere that shelters and nurtures, but finding only disruption. The sudden loss of her father when she was 14 left a wound that still refuses even to scar; it weeps continually as grim dreams of desolate spaces, many of which are places Etemad has actually visited, even inhabited. The transition to refugee was of course a marked struggle in her life, as it is in all those who must flee for whatever reasons. But in Etemad’s case it came after her victimization by the religious regime in Iran, which imprisoned her for mocking it in published cartoons.
Thus, when Etemad landed on these shores, she was already a veteran of several personal and political conflicts. Her early years as an American resident were easier only by degree. Only now does her life look peaceful – and balanced enough for Etemad to be able to reflect on its dramatic turns and surreal contexts.
Etemad is indeed a surrealist – albeit one sensitive to the delicate as well as to the monstrous in life and art. In this she follows in a line of surrealist women painters like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, Léonor Fini and Charley Toorop, painters who manifested a distinctly feminine (and arguably feminist) outlook. Like theirs, Etemad’s art is emphatically pictorial but nebulously narrative, resistant to social convention but soft-spoken in their arguments and ultimately transcendent rather than triumphant in their visual universes.
The mushroom is the hero of Etemad’s story/stories; it is also the mise-en-scène, the deus ex machina, and the leitmotif. The mushroom is the protagonist and the backdrop at once. It is essentially the language, not just the protagonist, of Etemad’s discourse. It appears everywhere and modifies everything. Etemad does not depict mushrooms so much as render them, choosing them (from an in fact limited range of species) for their inherent sense of animation. They are the storytellers; Etemad simply provides them the stories to tell. Lest that sound as if she surrenders agency to them, however, we have to acknowledge the fine line of her pen, the exquisite poise of her brush, the virtuosic skill she employs with all her media. Etemad claims authorship of these apparitions by realizing them as vividly and as gracefully as she does. She speaks through her mushrooms, but they in. turn speak equally through her.
Somaya Etemad does not make pictures or tell stories; she re-lives and re-imagines them in visible languages born in her dreams. We human beings live, prominently or vicariously, by our dreams, but not all of us can re-live through them, much less do so with such urgent charm. Do not look for Etemad’s history in her art, look for the sensation of living she has come to design via her subconscious. Any of us can claim we, too, generate such sensations, and we do. But do we do so coherently? Do my dreams make sense to you? They do only when they can escape the dreamer, when the dreamer has the skill to convey the ambient flavor of the dream. And all it may take to convert mute imagery to shared revelation is a consistency of language -- in Etemad’s case, that consistency manifesting in the ubiquity of gentle fungi nourishing and at the same time representing us. Etemad’s mushrooms are of her and for her – and for us and of us as well.
Los Angeles
June 2025
