Stickers and graffiti cover the walls, the ceiling, and the floors as you ascend the interior stairwell of the Luggage Store Gallery. Over the years, many artists, and indeed many visitors, have made their mark here. Taraneh Hemami’s Fist (all works 2013), a powder coated aluminum and Plexiglas sculpture of a clenched fist raised in solidarity, is positioned at the top of the stairs, increasingly visible with each step. It presents a striking emblem of the Luggage Store’s long legacy as a fundamentally gritty alternative nonprofit arts space and embodies the same spirit of the layered stickers in the long entrance. It also offers visual entre to Hemami’s solo exhibition of largely sculptural new works that explore the visual history of resistance leading up to and beyond the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

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