Sheida Soleimani: Flyways

March 19 - May 1, 2026
Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer
Gallery Hours: M-F 9am-5pm

Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani’s exhibition Flyways (a reference to the migratory patterns of birds) represents the latest iteration of Soleimani's ongoing Ghostwriter series, in which she continues to explore her parents’ experiences of political exile and migration as a lens to examine broader systems of geopolitics. Soleimani creates detailed compositions in the studio that combine photographs, props, live animals, and even her own parents, resulting in surreal, magical realist scenes.

The artist's most recent works include imagery evocative of her family’s history alongside photographs of injured birds from her care work as a wildlife rehabilitator. As an extension of her art practice, Soleimani founded the non-profit Congress of the Birds, a wild bird rehabilitation center in Rhode Island. The sheer range of Soleimani's practice—her choice of imagery, subject matter, and method—informs a visual language that is surprising, inventive, imaginative, and contemporary.

The exhibition also includes a new site-specific wall drawing created as part of the Institute for the Humanities Gallery project.

Sheida Soleimani is an artist, educator, and licensed wildlife rehabilitator whose work examines power, environmental crisis, queerness, migration, and care. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani draws on archival materials, props, and sculptural elements to create visually lush, politically incisive tableaux. She works across various mediums, investigating themes such as oil politics and human rights abuses, confronting the systems of violence linking the SWANA region and the United States, unraveling their implications in American culture. Though her images are dreamlike, they are grounded in lived experience: her parents frequently appear as subjects, in compositions made from elements of their (sometimes harrowing) tales. Increasingly, wildlife enters the frame – injured and orphaned birds, with their own quiet stories of migration and survival. Before the lens, these animals encapsulate Soleimani's multifaceted practice: care as art, storytelling as resistance.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in institutions such as the International Center for Photography, New York (2025), the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2023), Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City (2019), Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta (2018), and MoMA PS1, New York (2017), to name a few. Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Cranbrook Art Museum. In 2018, she founded Congress of the Birds, (originally) a home-based clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, where she provides care for wild birds.