Art, empathy and immersion: How Mitra Kamali facilitates multi-cultural cultural connection in the Valley

On an uncharacteristically humid April night, a cluttered collection of pastel paints, colored pencils, construction paper and magazine clippings, were used by members of the Phoenix community to draw their first memories of water at Snood City Styles on Phoenix’s Historic Grand Avenue.

Some members depicted oceans while others stenciled outlines of boats on a dock. These art pieces were part of Valley artist and activist Mitra Kamali’s first My Water, My Culture visual storytelling workshop.

All gathered around folding tables which had been set up under the twinkle lights on the back patio of the storefront, listening as Kamali explained the urgency of water conservation in the desert.

Kamali is a first-generation Iranian American artist, engineer and social activist who has been a pioneer in the Valley art scene for nearly three decades through a combination of visual storytelling and grassroots advocacy. She focuses on facilitating cultural awareness and bringing attention to social justice issues, human rights and equality.

“Separation anxiety from my parents, having nightmares about my family back in Iran, the fact of never returning to my birthplace as well as recognizing racial issues, inequality, and social prejudice existing in the world, caused me to be an empathetic person,” Kamali told The Arizona Republic. “I decided to create artwork that would depict people as one race.”

Connecting with the Phoenix community through her Persian-inspired art has become a necessary element of her work, managing exhibitions, collaborations, and a Persian New Year Nowruz festival she brought to Valley cities over the years.

The artist, who has devoted much of her career to bringing Persian cultural awareness and education to the Valley, sits on boards of what seems an endless list of arts and community-based nonprofits, including the Cultural Arts Coalition Global Connections and Arizona Humanities. She serves as the art director for the Arizona Persian Cultural Center and was the former Persian Cultural Director for the Asian American Association of Arizona.

Drawing on her past to make connections

Often drawing upon ancient Persian artifacts, poetry and figures, Kamali's pieces are meant to encourage empathy and human connection through Persian culture at a number of venues across the Valley, including the Herberger Theater Center and Orpheum Theatre.

“It’s been something that's really important to her and shows up in much of her work,” said Melanie Ohm, co-founder and current director of the Cultural Arts Coalition.

The artist said she looks to the past to find ways to facilitate multicultural connections in the present. “Ancient wisdom is so brilliant,” Kamali said. “I do things to support the needs of society, to focus on what is important, like women’s rights. Without our rights, we are nothing.”

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Kamali’s recent series, Go Beyond Boundaries: Human Connection, which hangs in her home, was born after Kamali experienced a life-saving MRI procedure that led her to think about how all humans are made of the same tissues and bones. The artist then created a series of brightly colored abstract paintings to express her ideology that the shared human experience transcends definitions of race, gender and social status.

“Life is not at all easy, but when you get to a place of saying ‘okay, what can I do about this, I’m still alive, I’m capable of doing something,’ that is what keeps me going,” Kamali said, gesturing toward a painting depicting the face of a Persian woman in a translucent-colored moon.

In the piece, called Persian Moon, the face is crying tears of blood. The tears are symbolic of the many modern-day Iranian women suffering from injustice, cruelty and a lack of human rights and freedoms, Kamali said.

Kamali said her passions for teaching cultural empathy and advocating for global human rights was the result of her early childhood experiences growing up in northern Iran. Born in Tehran, the country’s capital city nestled under the foot of the Elburz mountain range, the artist spent her formative years drawing, painting and designing paper models of small cities and towns.

Kamali left her home country of Iran for the United States in the late 1970s. She moved to Arizona in 1988 following a career as a reservoir and pipeline engineer in Texas.

Kamali said art had always been her true passion and her first love. After her move to the Valley, she wasted no time using art, community outreach and civic engagement to bring her all-too-underrepresented Persian culture to the desert.

“My earliest memory of creating is when I was in elementary school, my mom bought me a set of six gouache paints that I used to create all the colors in the rainbow,” Kamali said. “I created a small community where I could color different buildings.”

Kamali recalled her mother being an activist, describing her as a deeply maternal parent who acted as the head of the household. “She made sure we would definitely come to a place that has rights for women,” Kamali said.

Young Kamali immigrated to the United States when she landed in a petroleum engineering program at Louisiana State University.

It was during those first weeks at Louisiana State that Kamali began to experience judgment from her peers because of her accent, nationality and appearance. She recalled one particular instance upon meeting her American roommate who was quick to express anger over having a “foreigner” in her dorm.

Kamali said she did not let the xenophobic undertones of her American peers sway her.

Overcoming adversity and teaching through immersion

After receiving her degree in petroleum engineering, Kamali was forced to put her art aside in order to support her parents through the Iranian hostage crisis.

Kamali said her parents were put on house arrest for nearly eight years.

It was not until after her parent's immigration to the United States in the early 1980s that Kamali was able to turn her full attention to her advocacy through art. Her first exhibition, award and publication took place in the '90s, following her parents' arrival.

Kamali said she quickly gained traction in the Phoenix arts community for her art and activism in the late 1990s. She created a series called Human Interlude after she was invited to India and Japan as a cultural representative for Scottsdale Community College.

The series is a collection of murals that combine realism with expressionism to depict the unifying intricacies of interpersonal and intercultural relationships, the artist said. The paintings were exhibited at Sun City Art Museum.

That same year, Kamali was recognized by then-Scottsdale Mayor Herb Drinkwater for her efforts to advance cultural diversity and community after she painted seven 8-by-12-foot murals to be displayed at the city’s annual International Winterfest, a celebration of cultural diversity.

The World Murals she created for the City of Scottsdale were displayed at the Civic Center Mall during the Windows of the World event and were later moved to be put on display at Phoenix’s Orpheum Theatre.

In the decades that followed, she volunteered her time teaching art and culture at the Boy and Girls Club of Phoenix, South Mountain High School and The Molly Blank Fund Teaching Artist Program at Arizona State University.

During her early work with the Boys and Girls club, Kamali met Judy Butzine, the co-founder of the Cultural Arts Coalition. She began working with the coalition to advance cultural immersion in the Valley.

“She is everything. She’s not only unbelievably knowledgeable about her country and her world and very educated, but then she’s also a person who is able to be in the real world,” Butzine said, describing an exhibit they did together with the CAC at Phoenix Symphony Hall. Butzine explained the pair bonded immediately when they met due to their shared mission of honoring all people and their rights through art and activism.

In 2017, Kamali petitioned the Scottsdale City Council to support a grant that would allow for the implementation of the city’s first Nowruz festival, the celebration of the Persian New Year. The festival was celebrated by the city for the first time during the Arizona Asian Festival that year.

The artist said she sees festivals as a form of living art. She said immersion in festivals is part of her activism because it allows for people to gain a better first-hand understanding of other cultures, a way of teaching people to appreciate cultures other than their own.

The "My Water, My Culture" workshop in April, a series Kamali had been working on with the Cultural Arts Coalition and the Arizona Water Association for more than a year, was one of her most recent art-based community outreach endeavors.

“She’s been involved in so many things. She has been fearless in her role as an artist, helping people to learn more about their communities and themselves and their ideas,” Ohm said.

Promoting human connection in future projects

Kamali said one of her favorite projects from recent years was a Water Project art exhibition at the Sky Harbor Museum in 2019, an area of her grassroots community activism and education the artist said is particularly important to her these days.

In February of this year, Kamali designed a piece called “Ideas of a dream community” which was presented at the Arizona Housing Coalition’s annual conference at the Mesa Convention Center. The conference focuses on strategies to ensure safe and affordable housing in Arizona.

“I am hoping that the energy spent on education, housing, water issues, and advocacy for the rights of people through my art will have an impact on our community,” Kamali said. “My first concern is resolving the Arizona water crisis as water equals life. I will continue to create a collaborative workshop where science meets art.”

The artist is focused on a recent proposal she made to the Arizona Capitol Museum for an educational multi-cultural festival she designed, titled “Reimagining World Peace and Celebrating the Rights of all.”

“This is a multidisciplinary event that includes visual artwork that is inspired by the roots of human rights, a 12 feet tall wooden Peace Pole with inscriptions in 8 different languages saying: May Peace Prevail on Earth,” Kamali said.

The festival, according to the artist, will include poetry, music and dance to bring festivity and joy to the community. The Arizona Capitol Museum responded to her proposal asking her to apply officially. Kamali said she has submitted the forms and is hoping to host the festival before the end of 2023.

Throughout the three decades that Kamali has spent in the Valley advancing multicultural connections through the arts, she said there is one Persian poem that has informed nearly all of her artwork and activism.

The poem was written in ancient Persia in the 13th century AD, during an extremely turbulent period in Iranian history by renowned poet Sa’di.

Titled Bani Adam, which translates to Human Kind in modern English, it reads:

“Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul. If onemember is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain. If you have noempathy for human pain, the name “human” you may not retain."

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Mitra Kamali facilitates multi-cultural cultural connection in the Valley