Trip wires. Border crossings. And an MFAH gala.

There was a princess in the house – the elegant, studious Sheikha Hussah Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah of Kuwait – checking out the new galleries for 200 treasures from the al-Sabah Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. What seemed like hundreds of schoolchildren filled Cullinan Hall with noisy excitement. Staff bustled around finishing up video projections and the kumquat tree-lined décor for one of the most glamorous events of the social season, Friday's Arts of the Islamic World gala.

Amid the din, museum director Gary Tinterow was handling an invitation to Sheikha Hussah from President George H. W. Bush, who'd invited her to his house for an impromptu visit. But Tinterow didn't want us to miss an installation in the Law Building's lobby, and he made a point to step in with curator Alison de Lima Greene.

Not that you could miss Mona Hatoum's "Twelve Windows." Between specially constructed walls that create a narrowed entryway into the museum, the installation holds a dozen gorgeously cross-stitched textiles, each one meter square, representing a dozen Palestinian villages.

Hanging on steel wire across the space, the colorful "flags," as Tinterow called them, look like they've been hung up to dry. You could almost imagine laundry lines stretched between buildings.
We had to chuckle at the thought of Friday evening's VIPs in their sequined ballgowns navigating the network of cables, which are bolted to the floor in a zig-zag pattern with no obvious clear path. They're an intentional obstacle, Greene explained.

"The experience of walking through is very much a hazardous negotiation between all these trip-wires, which you could say represent the boundaries that keep people from traveling back and forth between Israel and Palestine; or related to our own history with Mexico; or just the bureaucracy everyone lives with in these circumstances," she said.

Hatoum refuses to limit the references to Palestine; she's suggesting the obstacles all people face in everyday life.

"There's something always very seductive about her art," Tinterow said. "When I see a Mona Hatoum I inevitably smile first. Then you think about it, and you have a different reaction. She always engages you in a way that's almost playful. There might be household items like cheese graters, but she'll blow them up to a huge scale and they become like objects of destruction. On the one hand it's familiar, like a Claes Oldenburg Pop Art gesture, but then you start thinking, what is this cheese grater for at this scale?"

Tinterow calls Hatoum "one of the most sophisticated artists operating anywhere in the world at this level," but also finds her work poignant because of her own history.

A Palestinian who ended up in Lebanon, then was exiled in London, Hatoum came out of the same generation of artists as Anish Kapoor -- artists who insisted on retaining their identity as a response to dominant currents in English art.

"They helped change that current," Greene explained. "Her work has always been strongly feminist. She often is very interested in work that contributes to social good. She often works with craftspeople who need employment."

The flags of "Twelve Windows" were designed with the Inaash, a non-government organization of Palestinian women working in Lebanon to keep traditional embroidery alive. They're famous for the quality of their work.

A young Palestinian colleague who organizes the Houston Palestine Film Festival burst into tears when he visited the installation, she added. "He said, 'I never thought I'd see this represented in a museum.'"

You might, however, find it on the streets of East Jerusalem or online.

"When you go to Palestine or Israel, you can buy souvenirs like this produced by the Inaash. What's different is that each one of these patterns has a specific local meaning," Greene said. "It's like if you saw someone wearing a burnt orange T-shirt, you'd immediately think 'UT.' They're regional flags with real meaning."

Tinterow got in the last word.

"When I saw this in New York three months ago, I thought, let's see if we can get this for our gala. It's festive, meaningful, poignant, pointed. It's just a great opportunity to open a discussion about Islamic civilization and the difficulties and challenges they face. It was a bit of a coup to get this. It had other plans but we derailed it for here, and everybody was very cooperative."

Look for an exhibition of Hatoum's work at the Menil Collection in the near future. For now, you'd better hurry: "Twelve Windows" is on view through Feb. 8.

Bookmark Gray Matters. You inevitably smile first. Then you think about it.