April 22, 2010 | 1:36 pm

Webcast: Iranian Jewish artists make a big splash at new exhibition!

Posted by Karmel Melamed

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Iranian Jewish art curator and architect, Shulamit (Shula) Nazarian made history earlier this month by transforming her Bel Air home into an art salon featuring the art work of six prominent and contemporary Iranian American Jewish artists. During the last 30 years since their migration to the United States, Iranian Jewry for the most part had focused their attention on setting up new roots in their adopted homeland and being able to survive financially. Now that the community has flourished and grown, they have expanded their interests into different areas— including the arts! Recently this new venue enabled artists from the community such as Krista Nassi, David Abir, Mitra Fourozan, Shahram Farshadfar, Soraya Nazarian and Jessica Shokrian to feature their unique array of paintings, sculptures, photographs and multimedia presentations at this new exhibition; “The Persian Jewish Legacy”.

On March 9th Nazarian first opened this unique art exhibition at USC’s Hillel where we caught up with her for this unique interview…

Iranian Jewish artist Mitra Fourozan discusses her art work…

An Iranian Jewish dancer doing a live performance at USC’s Hillel…

 

Iranian Jewish artist from New York, David Abir sheds light on his work…

 

Here is our special Persian language interview with Iranian Jewish artist Krista Nassi about her inspiration in creating installation art…

Nassi’s work that on both nights captured the attention of many viewers because of their unique combination of paintings and photographs as well as controversial political/social/ religious themes. My 2006 interview with Nassi featured in the New York based “Forward” newspaper, can be found here. The following are just snapshots of her work….

On an interesting note, Nazarian also featured the art work of her own mother, Soraya, who has been one of the Iranian Jewish community’s long time sculptors and well known philanthropists. Mrs. Soraya Nazarian has gifted a number of her Jewish or family themed sculptures to an array of universities in Israel and elsewhere in the U.S. When we asked Soraya Nazarian about her inspiration she said “both of my parents were very artistic and I have always had a special enjoyment for art so I have pursued it”.  The following are some snapshots of Soraya Nazarian’s work….

And other works from the remaining artists….

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