Willie Cole is no stranger to Birmingham audiences. His work was the subject of a 2007 touring retrospective and a 2013 solo exhibition at beta pictoris gallery, so one might wonder what revelations could possibly appear in “Willie Cole: Transformations” at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

If there were only two things that might strike terror in the hearts of the average American, they would likely be Iran and drugs. So, Taravat Talepasand’s exhibition “Not an Arab Spring” begins from a place of wry wit and dry humor that may escape many viewers. For other viewers, the challenge may be greater given the fact that the one ubiquitous image of Ayatollah Khomeini is not necessarily as iconic to a younger generation of US viewers, but for Talepasand this is not an issue.

If the single criterion for a successful show were the quality of its images, Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project would certainly fulfill that test. Bey, after numerous visits over the years to Birmingham with a desire to create a project there, worked through various community and religious organizations to arrange to photograph 32 sitters—boys and girls the ages of the six children who died in Birmingham on September 15, 1963, and adults who are the ages those children would have been today