Maryam Safajoo: Repetitious Insecurity
June 6 - July 20th, 2025
Maryam Safajoo is a Persian-American painter and activist exploring women’s rights, cultural behavior and responses toward violence. She creates narrative paintings illustrating the systematic persecution of the Iranian Baha’i community after the 1979 Iranian revolution. Many of these incidents only exist in the memory of those who experienced them and have no other pictorial representation. These paintings are often the first time these painful events have taken visual form.
Using a journalistic approach, Safajoo interviews people who were near or involved in the actual events depicted. She communicates with family members and community connections in Iran, some of whom are currently imprisoned, to verify every detail before painting. At once deeply personal and political, this artwork seeks to raise awareness about an oppressive situation in another part of the world. As Safajoo says, “the pain of one is the pain of all.”
About the Artist
Maryam Safajoo is a Tufts University alumni, a Persian American painter based in the United States and graduated with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. Her paintings narrate the stories of the contemporary situation of the systematic persecution of the Iranian Baha’i community after the 1979 Iranian revolution. She explores women's rights, cultural behavior and responses toward violence and human rights violations to encourage conversations that challenge the lack of representation of ethical behavior, people and voices in our global consciousness while highlighting the necessity of freedom of thought and expression.
“I experienced this oppression myself in Iran. I remember the day in the early morning when government security forces burst into my home, ransacked it and took my father to prison; my younger sister was crying on her way to school. Later my sister was denied access to university and because of her quest to understand why, was placed in solitary confinement.” These are only a few examples of what Baha’is around Iran have and are currently experiencing.
Her paintings narrate these stories which are a result of her conversations and interviews with the people who were near or in these actual events. Many of the incidents she depicts only exist in the memory of those who experienced them and have no pictorial existence. In many cases if visual records did exist, they have been confiscated by the Iranian authorities in raids of homes. Her depictions are often the first time these events have taken visual form. She records the details of this history. For example, the shoes, clothes, artifacts, and environments seen in her paintings are very close to those that were there in the event.
Her works are academic in nature and all these paintings are based on qualitative interviews or archival research. It could even be looked at as a form of visual ethnography which captures experiences of an entire community which have had no prior visual existence.
Some of her paintings depict the stories of the persecution of her immediate and extended family, the stories that she grew up with in her childhood. As a child she often accompanied her family to visit the homes of the Baha’is in Iran who had lost members of their family due to this persecution. Her mother herself was in prison when she was 19 for about 2 years and nearly all her friends she was imprisoned with were executed for being Baha’i (Mona Mahmoudnejad, Zarin Moghimi, etc…). They would often visit the families of her cellmates and she would hear first-hand the stories of these brave individuals from their closest relatives. While growing up her home was filled with the various stories of the persecution of the Baha’is around Iran and were woven into the fabric of her everyday life. These experiences in her formative years had a very influential effect on her and lay at the heart of her current artistic practice.
She takes inspiration from interviewing, hearing, feeling, reading, and researching the stories of the Bahai’s of Iran.