If it weren’t for the Met Breuer, New Yorkers might never see exceptional shows like “Siah Armajani: Follow This Line.” Its career survey of this American artist is well-timed for an era of sundering moral confusion and offers ways forward from it.

Mr. Armajani was born in Iran in 1939, arrived in the United States as a political exile in 1960, and has been here ever since. For more than 50 years, he has been producing public sculpture across the country — there’s a wonderful example installed in Brooklyn to coincide with the Met show — yet his name still has low recognition value, even within the art world.

In part, he is responsible for this. He has chosen to spend his entire career in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, rather than in the art capitals of either coast. And his architecturally scaled structures, though rich in visual texture, are far from being eye candy. Most of them seem to say “welcome,” when they’re really saying “not so fast.”

Indeed, the Met Breuer show, his first major retrospective in New York (it debuted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis), requires some effort, in the form of looking and label reading, to become fully accessible. It’s well worth the effort. To take in the full span of his art at a lingering, inquiring pace means you get to spend time with a sharp social thinker, a wry (and increasingly melancholic) metaphysician and a plain-style visual poet.