Press
Mehri Dadgar | Artist
Since 1994 she exhibited her paintings in Canada, Sweden, England, and the United States. She received her Masters of Fine Arts with honors from California State University of Long Beach in 2007 and taught at college of Marin and other institutes. Her passion for life, the arts and education has led her to create Fine-Arts while teaching.
“A half dozen or so on view at Mill Valley's Barefoot Art Gallery in a show called "From Reality to God Almighty." It includes pen and watercolor drawings depicting her painful prison experience and some delicate little gouaches that riff on Persian miniature paintings. A self-portrait shows a figure in a chador, or body-covering cloak, sitting blindfolded on a blue-fringed blanket facing a brick wall that bears her shadow. Dadgar made similar images before leaving Iran with her then-husband in the 1990s, but she hid them for fear of being arrested.”
– Chronicle
The Grave. That's what Mehri Dadgar and other imprisoned young Iranian women called the slow torture they endured: sitting blindfolded, cross-legged, silent and motionless in a small, isolated space 17 hours a day for months on end. It was even harder to take than being beaten on the soles of the feet with a chunk of steel cable.
"The Grave was the harshest punishment I went through. It makes you crazy, really frustrated and crazy," says Dadgar, a Mill Valley artist who was arrested in 1981 for handing out pro-democracy newspapers. She spent five years in various Tehran prisons for refusing to sign a document accepting "the truth" of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's oppressive fundamentalist regime. Some of her friends were executed, others snapped.
– Jesse Hamlin
