SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Haines announced the acquisition of Shiva Ahmadi's Inferno's Embrace, 2024 by the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.
Across multiple media, Shiva Ahmadi explores urgent global issues—including political oppression, violence, immigration, and women’s rights—through imagery shaped by current events and personal experience. In Inferno’s Embrace, part of a luminous watercolor series centered on female figures, the subject's body entwines with flora and fauna, invoking mythic and primordial power. Begun during the COVID-19 pandemic, this ongoing series took on new significance following the passing of Mahsa Amini, who died while being detained by Iran’s Morality Police for her “improper” hijab. In Ahmadi's works, the female body—and hair in particular—becomes a powerful site of resistance, vulnerability, and strength.
Inferno's Embrace joins an important work by Ahmadi already in the Crocker Art Museum’s collection—one of the artist's signature Oil Barrel sculptures, commissioned by the museum in 2022.
Ahmadi's work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Crown of Flames, March 13 – April 25, 2026 at Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Fables of Fire and Water, October 15 – December 19, 2025 at Stanislaus State University Art Gallery, Turlock, CA; and Strands of Resilience, January 28 – May 6, 2024 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA.
Shiva Ahmadi's (b. 1975, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA) works are additionally held in the collections of the Asia Society Museum, New York, NY; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and San Jose Museum of Art, CA, among others. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a Career Achievement Award in Art, Art History, and Design from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. Shiva Ahmadi, a monographic publication of her work, was published in 2017 by Skira.
