Seyed Alavi

Seyed Alavi’s work engages with the poetics of language and space and their power to shape reality. His site-responsive artistic practice takes the physical and conceptual aspects of the location into consideration.

Alavi has created site-specific installations for the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Franklin Furnace in New York City and the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach. His public art projects include Fountain Head, Walnut Creek, California; Tree of Life in Seattle; Room for Hope and Flying Carpet, Sacramento, California; and Tale of Time, Kochi, Japan.

Alavi has received grants from the NEA/US-Japan Creative Artists’ Fellowship, California Art Council, and Western States Arts Federation, among others. He has taught classes and workshops at the San Francisco Art Institute; California College of the Arts, Oakland; San Francisco State University; The University of California, Davis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

In addition to his John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry residency at Kohler Co., Alavi has been an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington, Seattle; Capp Street Project, San Francisco; the Blue Mountain Artists Residency, New York; and the Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, California.

Alavi received a BS from San Jose State University and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is based in Oakland, California.