I love it when one of our smaller, quieter cultural institutions does something worthy of our larger, more vocal ones. This Friday, for example, we'll have a chance to see a comprehensive show of the work of a major, internationally known Iranian expatriate artist who lives and works in Germany. The venue? Not the Walker Art Center, our contemporary-art powerhouse, but the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center at Macalester College in Saint Paul.

The artist is Parastou Forouhar, who, after graduating from the University of Tehran with a BA in art in 1990, earned an MA at an art college in Offenbach, Germany, and now lives in Frankfurt. The show, "Ornament and Crime," at the Law Warschaw Gallery in the recently renovated Wallace Center, features a wide range of her work—photos, digital drawings, flip books, balloons—centering on issues of social and political power in today's Iran.

Death and Beauty

These issues are searingly personal for Forouhar, whose parents, both prominent intellectuals, were murdered in 1998, almost certainly for political reasons. Her response was to create a body of work that mourns and accuses, but in soft colors and sinuous forms, sometimes using or evoking Islamic calligraphy, sometimes employing photographic images that combine beauty and menace, as in the image of a luxurious chador and a single imprisoned hand, above, from the photo assemblage Freitag (Friday).

Forouhar has exhibited in Tehran (where her show was closed by the authorities), Rome, Turin, Berlin, Norway, London, and New York; the exhibition here was organized by Macalester's energetic Art and Art History Department chairperson, Joanna Inglot (whose 2007 book W.A.R.M.: Feminist Art Movement in Minnesota, 1970s—1990s, chronicles the most significant local contribution to feminist art).

The opening reception for “Ornament and Crime” is Friday, February, 8, from 7 - 9 p.m. in the Law Warschaw Gallery, Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, 130 Macalester Street, St. Paul. The exhibition runs from February 8 to March 10.

The artist will be present for a discussion on Monday, February 11, at 5 PM at Hewitt Hall in the Wallace Center.

It's an opportunity to be moved and challenged by art that's both intellectually alert and deeply emotional, in the intimate setting of one of our finest small, below-the-radar academic galleries.