Museum Exhibits: 2012



The College of Wooster Art Museum

Located in the Ebert Art Center

Shirin Neshat: Tooba 

Sussel Gallery

The College of Wooster Art Museum is pleased to present Tooba, 2002, an epic, two-channel video by the world-renowned Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.

Both the name for a woman and a tree, Tooba is also a mythical female character from the Qur’an that suggests a type of sacred or promised tree. Filmed with spare elegance and centered on a tree in what appears to be a Sufi garden, Tooba explores transcendence and tension, utopia and dystopia. Inspired by the 1989 novel Women without Men by Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur, Tooba was the first of Neshat’s works to be exhibited in Iran, and is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum.

In addition to Tooba, a 2010 interview with the artist by Catherine Camille Cushman will be presented in the CWAM’s lobby. This interview provides an overview of Neshat’s life and work.

Tooba is presented courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and the Neshat interview is presented courtesy of FLY16x9.com.



The Middle East: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Burton D. Morgan Gallery

August 28-October 14

The exhibition Middle Eastern Manuscripts, Ceramics, & Textiles is drawn from The College of Wooster Art Museum’s Permanent Collection. This special exhibition curated by Sarah Mirza, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, and Kara Morrow, Assistant Professor of Art History, features: one Indian and five Persian manuscript leaves; an Ottoman-era Qur’an; four Persian rugs; and seventeen ancient Iranian ceramic vessels.

In selecting these objects, Mirza and Morrow explore not only paleography and specific styles of manuscript, but also the dissemination of designs and influences across regions and media.



Shiva Ahmadi 

Sussel Gallery

October 23-December 9

Opening Reception and Talk by Shiva Ahmadi – Thursday, November 8, 6:30-8:30 pm

Born in Tehran, Iran, in 1975, Shiva Ahmadi’s representational watercolors are influenced by Persian and Indian miniature painting, yet occupy a charged psycho-visual space. According to the artist, her loosely spattered and highly
layered paintings on aqua-board, “Create an allegorical realm where faceless tyrants and religious authorities sit on ornate gilded thrones while subservient minions bow to them.” Although Ahmadi’s lush and seductive painting creates an uneasy tension that appears to be geopolitically specific, her work is a critique of all overt and covert dictatorial authority.