Before her work takes permanent form in front of the Palo Alto City Hall, Iranian-born artist Kiana Honarmand’s art has already lived elsewhere — across workshop tables and in surveys and one-on-one conversations with community residents. And, as the King Artist-in-Residence of 2025, she has spent the year collecting immigrant and BIPOC histories from across Palo Alto and incorporating them into her own artistic oeuvre.

In the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Corella Scott King (after whom the residency is named), the King Arts Residency uses art to better highlight underserved groups. Since its launch in 2021, the residency has focused on engaging the Palo Alto community in conversations about inclusion and belonging. The residency will culminate in the selected artist creating a public installation that will live in front of the Palo Alto City Hall.

For her residency, Honarmand chose to feature the lived experiences of BIPOC and immigrant residents, influenced by her own immigrant background and also her desire to highlight the diversity in the community. Her primary form of outreach is through holding open workshops with the community, one of the Residency’s longstanding traditions. Honarmand said these workshops were a wellspring of inspiration for her and enabled her to inquire further into the diasporic experiences of community residents.

“One of the questions I asked the participants was ‘What’s one small wish you have for this community?’” Honarmand said. “Many people wanted very similar things: a happy, safe, inclusive place where everybody can be together. Others just wanted more connection, togetherness, and shared experiences.”

Honarmand described the gatherings as intimate and deeply moving. In one workshop session, she invited participants to bring photographs of themselves or their families, of their immigration and ancestry or of any decorative newspapers and magazines with sentimental value. The participants were to cut the images into strips and then weave them together. The final piece, which would have a clustered, fragmented effect, was meant to reflect their own relationships to their home country.

“Making art and experiencing art are both very cathartic experiences,” Honarmand said. “When you’re making something expressing all of these feelings, whether it’s frustration or sadness, into the art, it can be a very healing process. When people come and make things together in a connecting and restorative space, we become stronger together as a community.”

What makes Honarmand’s art special is its deeply communal feel, emerging as she allows the experiences and histories of the surrounding community to guide her.

“The final piece I’m currently working on designing is going to be inspired by all of the conversations that I had with the community, through the one-on-one interviews that I did and the workshops and the surveys that people filled out,” she said.

Honarmand often works at the intersection of her own personal memory and the community’s collective experience. In her personal art practice, she gets creative with the materials, working beyond the formal boundaries of both Iranian art traditions and contemporary artistic styles. She has infused Renaissance-like clarity with elements of calligraphy, used Islamic architecture in her art, 3D-printed red hand-sculptures and scattered them around a gallery floor.

“I consider myself a conceptually driven artist,” Honarmand said. “It takes a lot of experimentation. I don’t always necessarily have a final vision. Sometimes it’s an idea, or it’s trial and error, and then it just keeps going until it becomes the final piece.”

Honarmand hopes she can bring this artistic freedom, coupled with a greater openness and willingness to reflect on one’s immigrant and BIPOC experiences, to those who she has reached.

“What art does is help people connect on a more human level,” Honarmand said. “We look different and we come from different backgrounds but we actually have a lot in common. We are all human at our core, and so my goal has always been to bridge the gap and bring people together to our shared human experiences, not our differences.”

You can learn more about Kiana Honarmad on her website kianahonarmand.com or follow her Instagram at @kianahonarmand.