Adam Bradley, “Pulled Toward Fate” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE IDEAS ARE MORE MONUMENTAL THAN THE SCALE in “Sculpture NOW 2026,” an exhibition of work by 30 members of the Washington Sculptors Group at Harmony Hall Arts Center. There are exceptions, of course. Near the entrance to the show, which was juried by Beth Bright, is one of Adam Bradley’s imposing sculptures of a mythological Fury, posed in midair atop a single support. The nearly life-sized woman’s sinews are suggested by cobbled-together chunks of wood and its flowing hair represented, incongruously, by swoops of metal.

At the other end of the space is a second large piece, very different from the first. Anne Stoddard’s “Concealed Carryland” is a wall-mounted textile assemblage made of four children’s blankets. A threat to kids is subtly rendered: outlines of pistols and machine guns embossed into the fuzzy fabric. The American obsession with personal weaponry is also discreetly symbolized in Jim Roberts’s elegant metal version of a U.S. flag whose stripes have come partly unraveled: Each fly-away stripe ends in the shape of a small gun.

Several artists offer abbreviated versions of larger works. Hyunsuk Erickson, who can fill galleries with her towering thingumabobs, here offers three smaller ones, made mostly of ceramic and partly covered in her trademark knitted fabric. Taina Litwak, also known for packing galleries with her work, presents a little excerpt from her “Plastic Tsunami,” an eco-parable assembled from throwaway stuff. Dayla Luttwak, whose metal tendrils can dominate walls, collaborates with Julie Zirlin on a medium-sized mixed-media piece in which metallic strands emanate from the center of a flower-like entity.

Some pieces are scaled to the things they represent: Roger Cutler’s aluminum “Hand of the Artist,” sleek and vital; Esperanza Alzona’s “Social Climbing,” whose set of hands is also made of aluminum and posed dynamically partway up the wall; Marcie Wolf-Hubbard’s mixed-media relief sculpture of birds, flat but pushed forward to evoke flight; Jennifer Hayes’s set of women’s undies simulated in ceramic and adorned with bronze butterflies; and Zirlin’s stylized mushrooms, glistening in metal-aping ceramic.

Other nature-hailing works include Mary Opasik’s mixed-media tribute to horseshoe crabs (which are bled to make human vaccines) and Sarah Wegner’s bronzes of tiny humanoids in motion. Nature is merely suggested by two abstract pieces: Mayukha Suresh gnarls root-like lengths of steel into a sort of coffee-table shape, and Zdeno Mayercak carves a large piece of red-shellacked oak into a shape that hints at seed-pods or internal organs.

Urban monumentality is mostly unaddressed, but Sally Canzoneri offers a two-sided paper view of D.C.’s NoMa district, architectural in both subject and form, while Gary Kret perches a rounded cast-bronze object beside a length of white marble, carved with a series of curved pseudo-arches, that seems to aspire to be national memorial. In this case, form winks at function.

INSTANT PHOTOGRAPHY IS ONE OF THE MOTIFS of “Present Imperfection,” a 32-artist show in a Chevy Chase Pavilion pop-up space. Anyone who knows the local “harDCore” scene will recognize another organizing principle: Many of the pictures depict local musicians, some of the photographers are associated with the Washington music scene, and a few contributors are themselves musicians. Organizer Pat Graham, who curated the exhibition with MORENOYCLARA, photographed D.C. area indie-rock musicians in the 1990s, and recently returned to the area after years in Europe. (He oversaw an earlier version of this show in Spain in 2017.)

The bulk of the pictures date to the 1980s and ‘90s, and include early work by such D.C. photographers as Lely Constantinople, who documented Shaw and Columbia Heights street scenes almost 30 years ago. Robin Bell, best-known for projecting anti-Trump slogans on local buildings, offers what are probably the most recent pictures: They document visitors to his recent “Milk Tree” show, another Friendship Heights pop-up. Among the out-of-town participants are Texas musician Tom Kerr, professional photographic portraitist Danny Clinch, and skateboarder-actor Jason Lee, who supplies some nice landscapes.

In addition to Clinch’s work, some of the most assured pictures are by local photographers Diane Krauthamer, who observes murals and graffiti, and Cynthia Connolly. The last was intimately involved with the D.C. hardcore-punk scene, and was one of the organizers of a 1988 photo book about it, Banned In D.C., that’s about to be republished. (For the record, the book includes a handful of my photos.)

Connolly’s most striking pictures in this array are not music-related. They’re elegant black-and-white photographs of cacti punctuated with letterpress-produced text in silver and yellow, and sometimes other colors. (The artist is also a letterpress enthusiast.) While much of the show has a D.C. time-capsule vibe, Connolly’s desert views suggest glimpses of an alternate universe.

Emon Surakitkoson, untitled (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THERE’S A NEW CLUE TO THE SOURCE of Emon Surakitkoson’s imagery in “The Joy of Simplicity,” her show at the Silva x Art Island Gallery. Some of the local artist’s recent pictures are adorned with frames, garlands, or veils, all made of fabric. These are Isan textiles from northeastern Thailand, the painter’s homeland. The Isan region is remote, culturally and geographically, from Bangkok and the Thai coast, and heavily agricultural. Surakitkoson’s intent to convey “the energy of a farming life,” says her statement.

Curated by Beth Ferraro, the show offers six paintings on rectangular canvases, four on shaped ones, and two freestanding pieces with a sculptural quality. As usual in her work, Surakitkoson meticulously paints interlocking black lines that loop into parallel forms. These previously were rendered in black-and-white, but here they incorporate color, whether integrated into the basic figure or as complementary accents outside it. The effect is to intensify the vitality of the swooping lines. So clean and crisp that they suggest machine-made matrices, Surakitkoson’s compositions don’t look very rural. But they certainly do express energy.

Marilyn Gates-Davis, “Two Old Dudes” (Amy Kaslow Gallery)

THE WASHINGTON MARILYN GATES-DAVIS PORTRAYS is homey but haunted. The local artist’s “Where We Once Belonged,” at Amy Kaslow Gallery, depicts the city in two simultaneous time zones. The six pictures begin as realist paintings of D.C. buildings, most of them identifiable as 19th-century houses. Atop these are drawings of Black inhabitants, defined by black outlines and filled in, to various degrees, with gray and white. Some of the mixed-media pieces incorporate collaged elements, including text, U.S. currency and a bit of an old D.C. map.

The people are engaged in everyday activities that don’t necessarily summon a specific time or place. Kids play basketball, a young couple cuddles, a woman braids a girl’s hair. But all these characters have a bleached-out quality that suggests they’re no longer present. Most telling is a picture of “two old dudes” who sit in red chairs whose color partly shows through their ectoplasmic bodies. The men exist only as memories of their pre-gentrification neighborhood. Death makes ghosts of everybody, of course. But so, Gates-Davis reminds us, does real-estate redevelopment.

Vugar Guliyev, “Away from Everyone” (Art League)

WITH A DAUBED, SOMETIMES GRAINY STYLE that recalls pointillism, Vugar Guliyev depicts empty places and people who are alone in or dwarfed by their surroundings. The 17 pictures in the artist’s Art League show, “Echoes of Solitude,” are painted with oil on canvas or wooden panel, a traditional format. Yet most if not all of the artworks appear to be derived from photographs, and many employ unnaturalistic color schemes that suggest psychedelic-era photo experiments with solarization.

Most often, green mutates into some variety of red. Thus tree trunks become fuchsia in a study of a woman who sits atop a car, and grass turns scarlet in a view of two horseback riders. The surface is equally crimson in a depiction of five sunbathers in a picture the Armenian-American artist puckishly titled “Sunny Day on the Red Planet.” While most of the show’s settings are commonplace, the anomalous hues render them distinctively alien. The titles of several of the paintings refer to memories or twilights, but the experience Guliyev most often evokes is dreaming.

Bran Cherie, “Exposure” (Vika Gallery)

BUTTERFLIES TAKE FORMAL AS WELL AS SYMBOLIC ROLES in “Metamorphosis,” Bran Cherie’s Vika Gallery show. In some of the paintings, winged insects represent beauty, fragility, transience, and transformation -- all classic signifiers. But the show, which was curated by Alex Green, also features pictures in which images of the creatures are employed more playfully.

Thus “Exposure,” whose brightly colored butterfly appears to drip red and blue pigment, as if wetly overpainted. Other pictures call attention to their artifice by using the outline of one of the insects as a sort of frame: A yellow koi swims in each of a butterfly’s blue wings, and another of the insects acts as the perimeter of a seascape. The latter painting is part of a quartet of pictures, hung together, whose essential subject is the color blue; these include a butterfly constructed partly of blueprints and a tiny orange-and-black insect on a vast azure field. Butterflies’s vivid hues inspire Cherie to flutter toward pure color.

Sculpture Now

Through Sept. 5 at Harmony Hall Arts Center, 10701 Livingston Rd., Fort Washington. pgparks.com/facilities/harmony-hall-art-center. 301-203-6070.

Present Imperfection

Through Sept. 12 at pop-up gallery, 5335 Wisconsin Ave NW. friendshipheights.com/events

Emon Surakitkoson: The Joy of Simplicity

Through Sept. 6 at the Silva x Art Island Gallery, 1630 Columbia Rd. NW. theartisland.com.

Marilyn Gates-Davis: Where We Once Belonged

Through Sept. 13 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Vugar Guliyev: Echoes of Solitude

Through Sept. 6 at the Art League, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. www.theartleague.org. 703-683-1780.

Bran Cherie: Metamorphosis

Through Sept. 4 at Vika Gallery, 1700 R St. NW. vikagallery.org. 202-750-1541.

Elizabeth Casqueiro, “Counterspace” (installation view) (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A SENSE OF PLACE -- OR, MORE EXACTLY, DUAL PLACES -- links two of the artists who are showing this month at IA&A at Hillyer. D.C. painter Elizabeth Casqueiro is known for semi-representational montages that depict buildings and vegetation but also include abstract gestures. Sunanda Khajuria is an Indian artist who divides her time between her homeland and China, and incorporates motifs from both countries into paintings that feature hard-edged images and bold colors.

Casqueiro’s “Counterspace” includes two of her customary paintings, but consists mostly of six banners that hang from the ceiling to interfere with a visitor’s straightforward route through the room. One side of the banner depicts a local landmark that would be recognizable without such titles as “Airport” -- Eero Saarinen’s Dulles, of course -- “Pentagon,” and “Basilica.” The other side combines arrays of plants, flowers, and fruit mixed with decorative patterning. Other motifs include eyes and the U.S. flag.

Essentially, the Portugal-born artist has separated the ingredients of her usual style and divided them between two planes. But from a vantage point within the dangling paintings, both natural and manmade realms are potentially visible, if not simultaneously on the same banner. Responding to the same impulse that inspired Cubism, Casqueiro seeks to show the viewer everything all at once. To wander through “Counterspace” is to get a whiff of omniscience.

The pictures in Khajuria’s “Beyond Borders: Who I Am Between Houses” are much crisper and more open than Casqueiro’s. The Indian artist outlines her hybrid subjects precisely and places them discretely on blank fields of light, neutral hues. Among the Chinese components are cranes, which symbolize longevity and even immortality; and two of the paintings are on Chinese-style scrolls. More suggestive of India are the vivid colors, which include green and fuchsia skin tones. These meditations on change, home, memory, and migration may represent ruptured personalities, but visually they’re neatly unified.

Even tidier are the wall sculptures in Iranian-born Florida artist Mona Bozorgi’s “Threading the Gaze,” which place gauzy photographs within meticulous wooden frames. The pictures are mostly selfies taken by women during Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom protests and printed on silk. Bozorgi then removes some of the threads from the material to make the image softer and more vulnerable. The frames are complex -- one is a six-sided star and another bends around the corner where two walls meet -- if ambiguous in significance. The way the wooden slats hold the gossamer pictures in place suggests that they’re protective. But they can also be seen as embodying the structures that confine Iranian women in subordinate status.

Sandy LeBrun-Evans, “Crying Eyes” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

A VISUAL VARIATION ON “EXQUISITE CORPSE,” the Dadaist word game, Multiple Exposures Gallery’s latest round of “Progression” strings together 48 photographs, slightly less than half of them black-and-white, by means of pictorial or thematic resemblance. Sixteen photographers, including all 14 current gallery members, contributed extraordinary images that range from narrative vignettes to found abstraction.

The segues often turn on similar shapes, textures, or compositions, but can also involve parallel elements of shadow, mist, or reflection. One notable sequence cycles playfully from fire to air, moving from Francine B Livaditis’s closeup of flickering sacramental candles to Maureen Minehan’s picture of steam swirling upward from a silhouetted chimney to Guillermo Olaizola’s vista of a large cloudbank that appears to be glued to the Matterhorn.

People rarely appear, and when they do are subsidiary to their environments -- or even entirely obscured by them, as in the case of Maureen Minehan’s telling picture of a girl who cloaks her face behind a Disney-princess kite. Battered surfaces, often industrial, are common, notably in Sandy LeBrun-Evans’s harshly lovely shot of two eye-like metal orbs that appear to weep rust. These circular forms enter the continuum, like a musical refrain, three images after Alan Sislen’s evocative photo of electrical gauges, also round, metallic, and scourged by time.

One picture is a visual rhyme in itself: Sarah Hood Salomon observes a tree, nestled against a building, whose trunk curves in seeming imitation of the three flights of fire-escape stairs adjacent to it. Sometimes a single glance provides all the progression a photographer needs.

Misuzu Fukeda, “Head” (Washington Studio School)

THE MAJORITY OF THE PICTURES in Washington Studio School’s current show are gentle, semi-realistic paintings of clouds, some of which incorporate scraps of kimonos. They look like details from old Japanese scrolls, but the exhibition’s title points to a different sort of history. “Hiroshima Revisited” pairs the work of two artists linked to the monstrous 1945 A-bombing.

Glover is the L.A.-based granddaughter of a Hiroshima man who was spared because he was out of town on the day of the bombardment. The other artist, Misuzu Fukeda, is a Hiroshima-bombing survivor who lives in Hawaii. Her paintings are, understandably, much harsher than Glover’s. Only two Fukeda works are included in the show, but both are multi-panel compositions that gain power from their repeated motifs.

All but one of Glover’s pictures depict skies tinged by orangish light; in another context, they would evoke sunrises or sunsets rather than a massive explosion and resulting conflagration. Fukeda’s raw, heavily impastoed paintings are more direct: One is a set of decayed fruits and vegetables, and the other a series of burned, mangled, and skeletal heads. The first depicts natural wasting; the second portrays deterioration that’s entirely unnatural. What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these pictures attest, was literally perverse.

Ignacio Gatica, “Preface to an Automated Stratosphere (USA)” (Von Ammon Co.)

VON AMMON CO. NO LONGER HAS A GROTTO-LIKE SPACE, yet there are stalactites poking from the ceiling as part of the gallery’s fifth annual multi-artist summer show, “Focus Group 5.” Liz Croft’s ceramic spikes are simple and white, as befits the white-box venue. But Tony Matelli’s bronze flower statues, which appear to grow from the shiny black floor, are painted in realistic colors, offering a rare nod to naturalism in a gallery that tends toward the stark, garish, and artificial.

Among the many twists on American icons are Jacob Kassay’s crisp collages of U.S. flags in unorthodox arrangements; Danny McDonald’s incongruous assemblage, which slumps a nutty Uncle Sam action figure atop an antique glass globe stand; and several pieces by Banks Violette, including drawn-on black-and-white photos of an upside-down Empire State Building and another U.S. flag, also upside down and rendered in silver metal bars and white neon tubes. Banks also offers two cryptic graphite drawings of cracked surfaces.

The term “focus group” comes, of course, from marketing and advertising. Von Ammon often offers for sale art that’s deeply skeptical about the business of selling. Capitalism manifests here in the forms of Sylvie Fleury’s set of shopping bags, one white and one black, and Ignacio Gatica’s aluminum-framed dot-matrix display of World Bank financial info. The latter artwork features yet another U.S. flag, pulsing blithely as the bond market begins to show cracks in the American prospect.

Jake Muirhead, “Persona” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

EXQUISITE CRAFT AND STYLISTIC DIVERSITY CHARACTERIZE the 2026 Peggy Doole National Small Works Exhibition, an annual show at Washington Printmakers Gallery. Writing about this selection is a bit odd for me, since I’m the one who juried it. But these prints and photographs shouldn’t be overlooked.

Among the noteworthy traditional prints are Jake Muirhead’s “Persona,” a wispy etching and drypoint of an imaginary beauty; Holly Berry’s “Point of View,” a bold woodcut of a river that’s carved a rustic landscape; Emmakate Sprenkle’s “Beetle,” a lino print of a green insect set off by bright orange and yellow touches; Joanna Kidd’s “No! Crow,” which positions a silhouetted blackbird atop an overlapped chorus of letterpress “no’s”; Sherrie York’s “Stillness,” a snow scene highlighted with light-blue drifts; and Sachin Pannuri’s “Banned in the U.S.A,” an etching and aquatint that uses watery, earthy colors to depict a woman amid books.

Of the prints that employ digital technology, the standouts include Laura Bloomenstein’s “Mahjong Chair,” printed on a field of actual game tiles; Craig Subler’s “No Return,” in which transparent plastic bottles almost merge into their backdrops; and Robert Hunter’s “Anselm’s Crow V-1,” which centers on another silhouetted black bird, this time on a subtly textured backdrop rendered in gray and blue.

The photographs range from Jim Allen’s “Remains 7/8,” which treats a closeup of animal bones as a silvery memento mori; Sallie Lowenstein’s “The Reader,” which observes a little girl in a large chair; Anne McMahon’s “Looking Out,” in which an earth-toned structure is set off by a ribbon of blue sea; and Terry Thiele’s “Titmouse,” whose subject perches within a green-patinaed metallic circle. For a show that the curator -- inadvertently -- filled with images of birds, this titmouse obligingly framed itself for an ideal composition.

Elizabeth Casqueiro: Counterspace

Sunanda Khajuria: Beyond Borders: Who I Am Between Houses

Mona Bozorgi: Threading the Gaze

Through Aug. 30 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Progression

Through Aug. 30 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

Yumiko Glover and Misuzu Fukeda: Hiroshima Revisited

Through Aug. 31 at Washington Studio School, 2129 S St. NW. washingtonstudioschool.org. 202-234-3030.

Focus Group 5

Through Aug. 31 at Von Ammon Co, 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

2026 Peggy Doole National Small Works Exhibition

Through Aug. 30 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Georgia Nassikas, “Cellular” (McLean Project for the Arts)

IN HER ENCAUSTIC ABSTRACTIONS, GEORGIA NASSIKAS provides the same intimate perspective on micro and micro. The 11 paintings in her show at the McLean Project for the Arts at Berlage Arts & Education Center fill the surface -- either paper or wooden panel -- from edge to edge, beckoning the eye into unchartable expanses. Whether the view is through an imaginary telescope or a simulated microscope, in “From the Cellular to the Celestial” the sense of vastness is identical.

The artist’s pictures are not exactly all-over compositions. There are hints of traditional landscape in some paintings, which suggest the blurry separation between earth and sky. A few vary the format by featuring planet-like totalities, their richly mottled patterns contained within “Celestial” circles. These pictures evoke things that are far distant, yet are as closely observed as the cellular vistas.

Nassikas mixes earth-toned pigments with beeswax (from her own hives) and resin, applies the material in rhythmic daubs, and then melts and further mingles the substance with a blowtorch. The third element, seen in only some of the pictures, is gold leaf -- also earthly in origin, but shiny and distinct. The glimmers both enhance and punctuate the organic whole, pulsing like energy from an unseen source.

If Joseph Cortina’s work is even more immersive than Nassikas’s, that’s a matter of format rather than skill. The artist’s line drawings of waves have been converted into projections that ripple across the floor and walls of a small, darkened gallery adjacent to the one that holds “From the Cellular to the Celestial.” Like the sea, Cortina’s “CREST + HOLLOW” is in continual motion, although its gentle currents are more akin to those of a small pond than a great ocean.

The eddies of light surge across the observer and also atop each other. Three mottled pastel ovals, projected on the floor, are continually jostled by curving lines that sweep across them. The effect suggests the movement of air currents as much as water, and also invokes the waves of various forms of universal energy. Most of those are invisible, but one isn’t: light, the very force which with Cortina has sketched an ever-fluctuating cosmos.

David Carlson, “Love” (courtesy of the artist)

Where Nassikas and Cortina symbolically reveal, David Carlson literally obscures. His “Subtle Connections,” just around the corner from the entrance to Nassikas’s show, consists of five abstractions that are partly overpainted in semi-opaque white. The semi-hidden pictures, made between 2026 and 2023, are all clearly the work of the same painter, but contain many disparate elements. The shapes are usually curved and freehand, but include some that appear to have been made with the aid of a straight-edge. While all the paintings feature bright hues, some are more much more colorful overall than others. A few patches of pigment are textured as if finger-painted.

Carlson is influenced by Buddhism and Taoism, according to his statement, which may be why his pictures partially emulate East Asian calligraphy and ink paintings. The closer to such models the paintings adhere, the most coherent they are. The most cogent entry is “Love,” in which small patches of blue, peach, and other colors are dominated by white, black, and gray. Carlson begins as an exuberant colorist, and then overpaints his the way almost to minimalism.

Melanie Kehoss, “Banjo Reclaimed” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

HISTORY IS THE MOTIF OF “FIFTY: A COMMUNITY MEMOIR,” an exhibition that marks Touchstone Gallery’s half-century as a local visual-art mainstay. But one of the most striking pieces is a starkly evocative reaction to current events: Saya Behnam’s “Hormuz no. 1” is a spiky cluster of paper scraps, colored with earthy pigments from the Strait of Hormuz and partly burned. As a testament to the futility of war, the piece is both sweeping and specific.

Juried by Laila Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, Fabiola R. Delgado, and L. Kasimu Harris, “Fifty” assembles works by 36 artists. The show features a few items that portray recognizable people and places -- Washington’s monumental core gets quilted by Aynex Mercado -- but most entries depict abstract or archetypal subjects. Among the latter group is dana brotman’s neo-expressionist portrait of a boy, rendered in characteristically bold shades of purple and metallic green.

The show’s theme is neatly expressed by “Farmor - Ttal,” one of Sally Canzoneri’s lenticular juxtapositions of an older and a newer image. Photographs of separate faces, one in color and the other black-and-white, merge or emerge, depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Melanie Kehoss, who deploys silhouetted figures in historical vignettes, has found an ideal framework for four scenes of musicians: an actual banjo. This American-invented, African-inspired instrument evokes the evolution of Black and White music, whether separated or blended, in the U.S.A.

The artworks’s layering can signify either memory or complexity, as in Reem Bassous’s “Ascension,” a vast painting on unstretched canvas. It’s essentially an abstraction, yet incorporates much nature imagery, including a tree and a vertically oriented -- ascending? -- fish. The picture uses such identifiable forms to represent all the earthly elements, seen and unseen, that surround and sustain us.

Georgia Nassikas: From the Cellular to the Celestial

Joseph Cortina: CREST + HOLLOW

Subtle Connections: Works by David Carlson

Nassikas through Aug. 15; Cortina & Carlson through Sept. 10 at McLean Project for the Arts at Berlage Arts & Education Center, 6910 Fleetwood Rd., McLean. mpaart.org/mpaberlagecenter. 703-790-1953.

Fifty: A Community Memoir

Through Aug. 16 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

“Crosshatch: Making Networks” installation view (photo by Vivian Doering)

“X” MARKS SOME OF THE SPOTS in “Crosshatch: Making Networks,” a four-artist show at PFA Gallery’s downtown location. The bulk of the work is by Maryland-based artist Francie Hester, who crisscrosses twinned spars of metal-emulating Plexiglas. The two largest of these wall-hugging sculptures have patinas that suggest oxidized copper or steel. The smaller ones, which line the venue’s hallway, are covered with diverse patterns that resemble collaged paper. In both cases, the complex surfaces effectively contrast the elemental form.

Tim Doud, once known primarily as a portrait painter, revisits the format of Gene Davis’s best-known pictures with three vertical stripe paintings. Doud makes the design his own by applying the pigment in stripes that gently blur into each other. The D.C. artist also experiments with form by leaning the painted panels against the wall to achieve a sculptural quality that recalls the work of another Washington colorist, Anne Truitt. But Doud’s striped slabs are jauntier and less austere than Truitt’s minimalist pillars.

Parallel lines also characterize the work of Joseph Shetler, who uses silverpoint to inscribe banks of thin, orderly marks. The D.C. artist frames these lines, which can be either horizontal or vertical, with single-color borders that are smudgy and irregular. “Untitled (verde valley)” also arrays the bordering green under the lines, but rendered softer and fainter. Viewers may find the artworks meditative even without knowing that they draw from Shetler’s strict Mennonite upbringing in Indiana.

The least geometric works are by Seth Adelsberger, who swirls layers of gesso and acrylic paint on canvas. Although the Baltimore artist forgoes straight lines and right angles, he is something of a minimalist. Each of his three textured paintings arrays a single shade of purple, greenish blue, or bluish green on a black field. That the effect is luminous is entirely apt. The artists of “Crosshatch” are as concerned with voluptuous surfaces as they are with recurring patterns.

Mark Wagner, “The Court of Common Please” (Pyramid Atlantic)

A FRAGILE DELICATE PERCH BETWEEN CHAOS AND UNITY is where the most striking pieces in “Superimposed” land. The Pyramid Atlantic exhibition presents the work of nearly 75 artists from across the country, juried by Carlos Hernandez, Shanna Strauss, and Chadwick Tolley. Each of the jurors has a fine piece in the selection, and their range is emblematic of the show’s: Hernandez’s playfully lurid screenprint collage features a tongue and a she-devil; Strauss’s elegant block print is a portrait of a pretty Black woman outlined in green on black; and Tolley’s quartet of collaged screenprints spatters classic American cartoon characters with color.

Although this is a national show, local artists are well represented. Veronica Barker-Barzel’s multi-style memory-scape places an ominous horned creature above images of children from bygone eras. Equally mythic is Suzanne Bartlett’s mixed-media picture of Daphne, cloaked in overlapping leaf-like shapes to represent how she turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s lust. Similarly layered but purely abstract is Katherine Bramante’s monotype collage, whose gray-and-tan color scheme gives it an urban feel.

Gail Shaw-Clemons’s abstract monotype-sculpture contrasts wild colors with gray expanses, and precise circles with tongues of what could be flame. Mei Mei Chang surprises with a moody abstraction, mostly brown and cyanotype, that has a red-patterned strip of fabric sewed into the center. Cyanotype also features in Marie-Béatrice Gauthiez’s partly abstract mixed-media picture, whose watery blues evoke a flood. Michael Crossett’s 85-layer cityscape montage demonstrates new techniques but retains such favorite motifs as Metro’s coffered ceilings. Jeffery Berg adds just one layer, the anti-Trump protest poster under a pencil drawing of seated men.

Various sorts of musings animate collages by Evi Sargeant, Caitlin Gill, Chas Foster, and Michael Waraksa. Sargeant invokes her history as a “transracial Chinese adoptee” in her lovely print of three bottles, each a different muted hue, labeled with Chinese text. Gill’s collage assembles exquisite textures into the forms of butchered animals, totems of male violence. Foster prints an image of a fierce werewolf on a grid of scraps of printed paper that appear to date from the same era -- seven decades ago -- as Hollywood’s first flirtation with the man-beasts. Waraksa visits similar territory with a digital collage that combines talismans of American sci-fi and horror movies with European surrealism.

Although few of these pieces protrude far off the wall, three of the most compelling ones conjure a formidable sense of space. Madeleine Underwood prints gradated red stripes on lined writing paper mounted on shaped plywood to effect an illusion of motion. Walter Plotnick divides a silhouetted image of figures atop girders, drawing the eye past the black shapes and into soft gray-and-white sky. Barbara Ziselberger (also a D.C. area artist) employs the opacity of sumi ink to give substance to a wispy, seemingly frayed frame strung with handmade paper beads. In all three works, the most important of the collaged elements may be the ones that aren’t actually there.

Lex Marie, “Keep it Together” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE SHREDDING IS OFTEN MORE CONCEPTUAL THAN LITERAL in “Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique,” a show of work by 23 local artists at the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities’s I Street Gallery. Relatively few jagged edges can be seen in this array, which includes such tidy entries as Mark Kelner’s “51 Books,” a shelf of American-history books with red, white, and/or blue designs on their spines. But if there’s not much ripping, there is a lot of critique.

This ranges from such contemporary topics as the devastation from ongoing wars in the Middle East, depicted in Helen Zughaib’s stark photo-collages, to such historical ones as the love lives of queer authors, animated from photos and placed inside a large glass by Tim Tate. There are also such autobiographical pieces as Andrew Kastner’s pointillist abstraction, which speaks to his “post-stroke experience,” and Joana Stilwell’s set of small jars that contain photographs disintegrated in oil and water, representing partly dissolved memories.

Many of the artworks address the Black experience. Anne Bouie’s provocative 3D collage places fetish objects around racist antique figurines of a Black man and woman, while Amber Robles-Gordon incorporates images of Black protest into a banner-like design. Most ominous is Lex Maria’s found-object assemblage of black belts stretched across black wood, evoking corporeal punishment administered in Black households. As encouraging as Maria’s piece is dread-full, Aziza Claudia Gibson-Hunter’s sprawling installation features a cascade of small paintings that enlarge as they move from left to right. The collaged pieces appear to be separating rather than unifying, but as they come loose they ascend joyously.

Leslie Harris, “There Are the Times” (Studio Gallery)

TWO VERY DIFFERENT PHOTOGRAPHIC VIGNETTES are among the highlights of Studio Gallery’s summer group exhibition, “It Was the Best of Times. It Was....” Gary Anthes’s picture of an abandoned Connecticut metals foundry is a vision of two separate eras: The age of American manufacturing supremacy is supplanted by the hip-hop era, represented by graffiti that’s reflected, almost glamorously, in standing water. This messy found image strongly contrasts Iwan Bagus’s elegantly staged photo of an ominous symbolic scene: A large bottle of red iodine solution appears to hover in mid-air over transparent miniature models of hospital-room furnishings in a pool of more red liquid.

Curated by painters Sabiha Iqbal and Carolee Jakes, both of whom are also contributors, the show collects work by about 20 Studio Gallery members. In Iqbal’s pictures of dancing figures, human motion is echoed, and sometimes upstaged, by colorful nonrepresentational forms. Jakes’s offerings include two renderings of solitary people and a semi-abstract picture whose dominant shades of blue are energized by near-white highlights.

Abstraction and nature images are common, and sometimes fuse, as in Iqbal’s work and Irene Pantellis’s mixed-media paintings of plants and roots, which are also studies of gestures and drippily fluid pigment. Two artists find beauty in damage and decay: Lisa Battle’s “Essence” is an abstracted ceramic representation of a flame that appears gouged on one side, as if by giant claws; and Joanne Levine’s “Regret and Resilience” is an oddly lovely photograph of browned, partly drooping tulips in a simple glass vase.

Levine’s picture is an allegory of the country’s current condition, but the piece that seems to speak most directly to the show’s title is Leslie Harris’s “There Are the Times,” a mixed-media painting. Bold swathes of orange and red seem to emanate from abundant text, including the words of Thomas Paine. Perhaps his exhortations will guide a political renewal, but for now Harris’s picture looks like a bonfire of the verities.

Crosshatch: Making Networks

Through Aug. 8 at Pazo Fine Art, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

Superimposed

Through Aug. 9 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.

Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique

Through Aug. 6 at I Street Gallery, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, 200 I St. SE. dcarts.dc.gov/node/1829986

It Was the Best of Times. It Was...

Through Aug. 8 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

Timothy Makepeace, “JWST - Central Baffle” (detail) (American University Museum)

CHARTING PARALLEL REAL AND VIRTUAL JOURNEYS, Timothy Makepeace’s “Ghost in the Machine” is partly a chronicle of the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope. But the artist also ventures hypothetically into space to observe the telescope’s location and some of the celestial phenomena that surround it. Curated by Thomas Drymon and Michael O’Sullivan, this fascinating exhibition is the largest of six shows of work by local artists currently at the American University Museum. (A seventh, by Janis Goodman, was reviewed in DisCerning Eye previously.)

Makepeace was one of several artists selected by NASA to document the telescope before its deployment to an orbit almost one million miles from Earth. After photographing aspects of the device’s assembly at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Makepeace made elaborately detailed charcoal-and-pastel drawings whose glimmering yellows represent the telescope’s gold-plated mirror. Some of these artworks were exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences in 2021-22, before the JWST was in position in space.

“Ghost in the Machine” moves both backward and forward from the NAS show. It includes a few earlier photorealist pictures that depict less elevated technologies, whether mechanical or electrical. But most of the entries are more recent, and reflect expanded knowledge of the telescope, its mission, and its other-worldly environment. Makepeace often works from photographs, so it’s no surprise that a starscape mimics a time-lapse exposure, albeit one made with what the artist calls an “imaginary camera.”

Many of these pictures are large, in part to emphasize the vastness of the territory the JWST is surveying, and the size of the mechanism itself. One impressively massive artwork was inspired by space, but also by the museum’s architecture. A 25-wide painting is mounted on an existing curved wall in a playful nod to the curvature of space. The depiction of a soft line that stretches from a black hole to the telescope can’t be seen in a single glance, so the viewer must undertake a voyage, however modest, to apprehend the whole thing. That’s a conceptual coup in a show packed with intriguing ideas. Makepeace may not be a scientist, but he’s certainly a creative thinker.

Susan Goldman, “Prima Vista 4” (American University Museum)

A SIMPLE GEOMETRIC SHAPE MAKES AN ASTONISHING ENTRANCE in Susan Goldman’s “Prima Vista,” a small but dazzling show of prints, mostly on gleaming aluminum. The artist is known for circles, sometimes taking the form of flowery ornamentation and usually split equally across four square quadrants of a larger square. Goldman’s layered, complex compositions can be seen as exercises in sheer form, but also as metaphors for evolution, mutation, and dynamism. The new dynamic element in this show is the triangle, which replaces the lower-right section of a circle in “Prima Vista IV.”

That jaunty triangle is fuchsia on a turquoise field, a typically vivid if unusually simple color combination for Goldman. Triangles appear several times in this show of work from 2024 to 2026, which was curated by AU Museum Director Jack Rasmussen. Notably, two of them intrude on “Mosaic Mélange,” a wall-filling 36-panel piece in which quarter-circles bounce around the grid, defying the customary format of the artist’s “Squaring the Circle” and “Squaring the Flower” series. As always in Goldman’s work, the system is clearly visible, yet playfully disrupted.

The selection includes a print on handmade paper, “Into the Orange Sky,” in which the hues of a sun-like orb gradate from orange to deep blue. Such pictures are also common in the artist’s recent repertoire, but this show concentrates on the latest variations on the “Squaring” series. These demonstrate Goldman’s canny contrasts of simplicity and intricacy, elemental form and ornate augmentation. In “Prima Vista” -- Italian for “first sight” -- the universe is essentially orderly, yet capable of being endlessly tweaked and teased.

Richard Dana, “The Prophet of Mind and Body” (American University Museum)

RICHARD DANA’S DRAWINGS ARE AS MONOCHROMATIC as Goldman’s prints are colorful, but that doesn’t mean they’re austere. Using just graphite, charcoal, and black ink, the self-taught draftsman renders lush tones, complex patterns, and surrealistic visions. There’s a lot of white space in Dana’s “People, Places, and Otherwise,” a retrospective curated by Nancy Sausser, but the emptiness doesn’t read as blank. The artist skillfully uses the unmarked areas to conjure depth and breadth, so the subjects appear to be placed in vast realms whose dimensions are just out of sight.

A few drawings venture literally into the third dimension, adding scraps of collaged lace or dwelling inside a lattice of plastic frames. Also included are some M.C. Escher-like geometric fantasias, shadowed and modeled to simulate a sculptural quality. One series depicts animals on printed patterns or pleasingly outlandish hybrid creatures such as a bird with a rhino’s head. By drawing such phantasms so precisely, Dana makes the unnatural appear almost commonplace.

Many of the show’s highlights are on a long wall hung with large vertical scrolls. These pictures are usually, but not always, hyperrealistic in style, if not in subject. One impeccably detailed charcoal drawing, “The Prophet of Mind and Body,” depicts a man who wears what appears to be a diving suit. But is that an air-hose behind him, or a tail? And his head inside a baroque helmet, or is his body topped with some sort of lantern? In Dana’s work, black-and-gray lines pretend to verisimilitude, while the actual images boldly untether themselves from reality.

A. Brockie Stevenson, “Purple Mansard” (American University Museum)

AMERICANA APPEARS PRISTINE AND ARCHETYPAL in the paintings and prints of A. Brockie Stevenson, (1919-2009), whose art is extremely realistic and yet cannily abstracted. While his subjects suggest an earlier era, contemporary Washingtonians may find some of them familiar. The largest piece in “An American Vision,” for example, is “She’s a Mighty Engine III,” a huge rendering of a Southern Railways steam locomotive whose green exterior the artist boldly contrasts with a red backdrop. The locomotive once chugged through Dixie, but since 1962 it’s been in Washington as property of the Smithsonian.

Stevenson taught for more than 30 years at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and many of the things he depicted are or were local. A picture of a house with a white picket fence, a scene that looks too iconic to be actual, is titled “Glen Echo,” after the historic Maryland hamlet where the artist lived and died. As this Edith Graves-curated show reveals, the American exemplar can be right next door.

Of course, Stevenson transforms his subjects, if only subtly. He flattens buildings, while employing crisp gray shadows to suggest depth. Lawns are blocks, or barely distinguished stripes, of green. Skies can be blue, but also such unnaturalistic colors as the orange of “Purple Mansard.” American flags convey old-time patriotism, but also hang, unruffled, as exercises in color and form. Stevenson’s pictures are twice idealized -- first as history, and then as geometry.

Bonnie Lautenberg, “1952 Singin’ in the Rain - Starring Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, Artist Yayoi Kusama, The Sea” (American University Museum)

BONNIE LAUTENBERG’S “ARTISTICA!” is based on a gimmick, but it turns out to be a pretty effective ploy. The artist juxtaposes a film still and an artwork, both from the same year, linking the two thematically or visually. This show, subtitled “Where Hollywood Meets Art History,” presents 43 of the 90 pairings in the series.

A few of the digital-print diptychs accede to a preexisting connection: Lautenberg’s 1965 time capsule pairs a frame from Antonioni’s Red Desert with a Lucio Fontana slash painting inspired by the film. Some of the duos exploit a comparable vibe, such as the pop-sex figures from 1979: near-naked Bo Derek in 10 alongside a Mel Ramos nude who’s emerging from a candy bar like a convenience store version of Botticelli’s Venus.

Sometimes the kinship is purely graphic, as in the coupling of E.T.’s spindly title character with an angular Basquiat figure, or a still from Singin’ in the Rain next to Yayoi Kasuma’s all-over painting, “The Sea.” Hollywood musicals and Japanese minimalism have almost nothing in common, but they can agree on blue.

Gail Rebhan, installation of “What Questions Do We Ask?” (American University Museum)

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES IN THE UNITED STATES over the last 250 years are mirrored by adjustments in attitudes, premises, and expectations. Gail Rebhan illustrates these with 11 text panels, each with historic queries from the Census Bureau, mounted on windows at the museum’s entrance. “What Questions Do We Ask?” arranges the Census’s shifting concerns into various categories, including race, disability, and native language.

Each set of queries is fitted into the framework of an American flag and printed on individual sheets that can be easier to read than the widow-mounted panels. Viewers can use QR code to ask their own questions, which are posted to the artist’s website (gailrebhan.com/what_questions_do_we_ask/). The effect is, of course, open-ended. However dismal the country’s current state, the American experiment is ongoing.

Ghost in the Machine: Works by Timothy Makepeace

Susan Goldman: Prima Vista

Richard Dana: People, Places, and Otherwise

A. Brockie Stevenson: An American Vision

Bonnie Lautenberg: ARTISTICA! Where Hollywood Meets Art History

Gail Rebhan: What Questions Do We Ask?

Through Aug. 9 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum

Janis Goodman, “Summer Glow Over Cove” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)

TWO SEPARATE SHOWS OFFER MORE THAN TWINNED VIEWS of Deer Island, Maine, local artist Janis Goodman’s summer home for 25 years. At the American University Museum, “Where Water Keeps Time: Graphite Drawings by Janis Goodman” depicts the rustic area entirely in gray, black, and -- sometimes most powerfully -- the absence of tone altogether. At Gallery Neptune & Brown, “Coastal Reverie” adds oil and watercolor paint as well as colored pencil.

In recent years, Goodman has most often shown luminous, cloud-filled skyscapes that flirt with abstraction even though their style is rooted in neoclassical painting. There’s one of those in the Neptune & Brown selection, but most of the pictures in both shows depict recognizable phenomena. The sky painting is, as usual, a tondo. Some of the drawings are also round, although sometimes with an element outside the circle, such as the many birds (and a lone seal) in several pictures at AU. The effect is graphically dynamic, and calls attention to the limitations of artistic representation -- real life overflows the neat borders of any vignette.

Goodman’s work can be quite detailed, but she’s an expert judge of what should be excluded from a composition. The AU pieces banish color, of course, and often place thickets of pencil lines on white fields. One of the loveliest pictures in this array, which was curated by Laura Coyle, is “Afternoon Reflection,” a view of rippling water below a distant stand of black trees. Every pencil stroke is deployed to frame the unmarked areas that are the essence of the picture, yet would be simply blank space without the gray gestures that define them.

Less unified but no less compelling, the Neptune & Brown show includes oil paintings that amplify the artist’s pencil closeups of ripples and eddies with color and textural effects. It also includes some gray-heavy graphite drawings in the same mode as the AU ones, and pictures that overlay watercolor tints atop pencil renderings. Most are rectangular, but a few are contained within Goodman’s trademark circles. The shape evokes the planet she stands on, and the orb that illuminates her summertime refuge in the silky-gray “Moon Over Cove.” It also suggests the eye, the human facility that distills disconnected instants of light, sky, and water into an enduring vision.

Tao Ya-Lun, still from “Ubiquitous No. 9” (IA&A at Hillyer)

IN A SENSE, “UBIQUITOUS GHOSTS” IS THE BIGGEST EXHIBITION ever mounted at IA&A at Hillyer. Comprising three works by Taiwanese new-media artist Tao Ya-Lun, the show reaches beyond the walls of IA&A’s converted carriage house -- first to Ukraine, and then into vast, near-empty spaces that can be entered only via virtual-reality goggles. “Ghosts” was curated by Mia Yinxing Liu, who teaches at Johns Hopkins and served as Tao’s interpreter during his appearance at the gallery.

Shaped by post-existentialist European thinkers, Tao’s art ponders displacement and systems of power. This is illustrated directly by “The Drifter,” a video in which the artist visits Ukraine as a surrogate for a 21-year-old Ukrainian war-avoider who emigrated first to Taiwan and then to Poland. (The video is available on YouTube.)

Tao walks the streets of Lviv, and even eats dinner with the exile’s family, all while wearing a VR rig that allows the absent man to experience the visit from a distance, but with immediacy. Both personally and technologically, Tao is detached from Ukraine, despite his physical presence here. But as a Taiwanese, he must have some sense of life under the threat of a powerful neighboring superpower.

The other two pieces, “Ubiquitous No. 9” and “Ubiquitous No. 10” place the goggle-wearing participant in unpopulated public spaces, enormous yet ethereal. The first one centers on Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919-20 “Monument to the Third International,” never built in real life but palpable and towering in this unreality. The second transports the virtual visitor through an abandoned -- yet still functioning -- amusement park and into a huge empty room. The viewer may feel like a specter in these imposing spaces, but it’s the spaces themselves that are ghostly. Simulations are secondary to actual existence -- for now, at least.

Andrew Wohl, “Red Expansion Chamber” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE “YOUR” IN THE TITLE OF WAVERLY STREET GALLERY’s “Beyond Your Boundaries” refers not to viewers but to the 14 contributors themselves. Pondering everything from the natural to the industrial to the political, the artists attempt to cross the borders that have defined their work.

The nature imagery takes many forms, often three-dimensional. Jeff Bulman photographs expertly composed closeups of vividly hued flowers, while Pat Silbert’s impressionistic landscape -- of France, aptly -- juggles yellow and purple. Bobbi Kittner’s semi-abstract paintings employ patchwork compositions and forms that emulate vines and flowers. Wanjin Kim gently pushes beyond the surface of two large nature-scape paintings by overlaying them with vines rendered in green-patinaed copper.

Even more sculptural are Jan Long’s ceramic gourds, painted in homage to Acoma Pueblo Indian motifs, and Jasmin Smith’s “Tiger Tails,” standing poles with collaged surfaces and protruding leaves, flowers, and striped tails. Rachel Carren’s four miniature shields chart the changing seasons in part with vine-like patterns in gold, and Kanika Sircar’s elegant “Night Skies” collages memorialize a longstanding interest in Mars.

The non-nature paintings are impressively diverse. Mark Kramer, an architect, jauntily renders French villages with angular forms and rambunctious colors. Eric Westbrook’s assured portraits are traditional yet distinctive. Jack Burbridge’s loose, lively “copy” of Peter Breughel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death” was energized by the artist’s opposition to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign. Of Jack Hornady’s four paintings, the simplest is also the most striking: “Glass of Milk” is just what its title describes, but what distinguishes it is a vertical glimmer of light on the glass, a phenomenon both ordinary and enchanted.

Another painter, Andrew Wohl, deviates the furthest from expectations by presenting a motorcycle exhaust pipe, cleaned of grime and painted a vivid red. Rather than resemble a Duchampian readymade, the scarlet twist looks like the show’s most luxuriant flower.

Jomo Tariku, “Nayala chair” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

TWO SLEEKLY STYLIZED DARK-WOOD CHAIRS sit at the center of “Wood and Stone, The Ancestral Permanence,” currently at Studio Russo. They’re the work of Ethiopian-American artist Jomo Tariku, whose “Nyala chair” has been featured in several Hollywood films. But most of the items on display are the work of Jon-Joseph Russo, the gallery’s namesake and proprietor.

Tariku, who lives in Northern Virginia, works in the European modernist tradition, yet his designs evoke African fauna. (Derived from South African languages, “Nyala” is a name for a species of antelope.) The chairs look machined, but are actually hand-crafted. They’re made organically, which suits their natural-world inspirations.

Russo’s work includes granite and marble furniture and some paintings, several of which depict stone sculptures. The furnishings combine functional and fanciful elements, as in the case of a coffee table with two small square niches meant to hold live plants. The artist models his pieces on classical Italian objects as small as a sarcophagus and as large as a palazzo, and can cut marble so thin it attains a papery translucence. His extraordinarily delicate tables with interior lights are solid yet ephemeral, like Japanese lanterns somehow hewn from stone.

Benjamin McVicker, “Meeting Future Strangers” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A MEDIUM-SIZED SHOW WITH A SWEEPING TITLE, “Power of Place: Arts and the Semi-Quincentennial” shoehorns the work of nearly 20 artists into Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. Juried by Bethesda gallerist Amy Kaslow, the exhibition encompasses prints, paintings, photographs, sculpture, and ceramics, most of which depict everyday inhabitable places. The selection’s subthemes are immigration and displacement, explored by some of the most interesting entries.

In a pair of photos, Ann Stoddard contemplates the border wall at Nogales, Ariz. Bristling with barbed wire, the slatted structure appears ominous, yet with a precise array of shadows that make it look a bit like an art installation. Signs and banners attest to the Chinese presence in an American city -- San Francisco, apparently -- in painter David Leonard’s crisp, evocative “Bilingual Sidewalk.” For Benjamin McVicker, representing “the impossible complexities of fitting in” can’t be shown realistically. His wooden sculpture, “Meeting Future Strangers,” is finely made but eccentrically shaped, suggesting an unnavigable staircase. The place it represents is a state of mind.

Nearby at Stone Tower Gallery, “Confluence and Connections” presents work by Bettina Ammann, Meg Dickerson, and Barbara Stauffer, former colleagues in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Post-Baccalaureate Ceramics Artisanry program. The last of the three artists could be seen as the most conventional, since she makes bowls. But she also crafts more distinctive pieces whose forms and finishes are alluringly complex: large stoneware flowers whose metallic-toned exteriors enclose hot-colored recesses.

Ammann toys with expectations by using porcelain to make things that appear to be soft: gridded wall pieces whose strands seem to fold like fabric, and bulbous pink shapes that suggest flesh. More evocative of architecture, Dickerson’s fabrications emulate concrete, and incorporate such building materials as wood and nails. Incongruously but effectively, she gives the surfaces a weathered aspect, as if the newly made pieces are old and worn. Like her cohorts, Dickerson crafts illusions in the form of objects.

Janis Goodman: Coastal Reverie

Through Aug. 1 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.

Janis Goodman: Where Water Keeps Time: Graphite Drawings by Janis Goodman

Through Aug. 9 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum

Tao Ya-Lun: Ubiquitous Ghosts

Through Aug. 2 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Beyond Your Boundaries

Through Aug. 1 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.

Jomo Tariku & Jon-Joseph Russo: Wood and Stone, The Ancestral Permanence

Through July 31 at , 1101 5th St. NW. studiorussollc.dom. 202-430-6988.

Power of Place: Arts and the Semi-Quincentennial

Bettina Ammann, Meg Dickerson, and Barbara Stauffer: Confluence and Connections

Through Aug. 2 at Popcorn and Stone Tower Galleries, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Valeri Larko, “Bronx Drawbridge, Starlight Park” (Addison/Ripley Fine Art)

THE CURATOR OF “GLITCHSCAPE,” TREVOR YOUNG, paints highways, airliners, and factories, so it’s hardly surprising that he picked Valeri Larko’s “Bronx Drawbridge, Starlight Park” for the 14-artist Addison/Ripley Fine Art exhibition. Larko’s precise depiction of the rusted and graffitied structure is stern and brawny, yet also elegant. It’s one of this fascinatingly diverse show’s several industrial vignettes, the most epic of which is Young’s own “Residual Sun,” a vast scene of a mysterious mechanism that contains a glowing red-orange orb.

Yet Young didn’t select only paintings of metal edifices. “Glitchscape” makes multiple sorts of links between representational and abstract pictures, not all of which appear glitchy. Thus “Residual Sun’s” central feature suggests a kinship with “Radiance Series: Dawn,” one of Mira Hecht’s luminous paintings of overlapping circles. The latter is cleanly rendered and entirely abstract, but its shapes and its play of light and dark complement Young’s otherwise quite different picture.

The more literally glitchy entries include Alex Schaefer’s semi-abstracted oil renderings of $1 and $5 bills; Reem Bassous’s suite of 30 unruly, graffiti-like black and gray gestures lined up tidily atop an international orange field; and five almost-sculptural paintings by Jason Gubbiotti. The last’s idiosyncratic works simultaneously build up and strip away, arraying brazen color contrasts atop hand-built and sometimes etched wooden panels.

The manner in which Gubbiotti interlocks form and abstract image resembles the strategy of near-realist Lindsay Mueller, who paints nature closeups on shaped wooden panels whose surfaces are lumpily distended by oil and acrylic pigment and other media. Although Taegan Treichel’s “Bell Garden” is just two-dimensional, its fairy-tale vision of a tightly compacted garden feels as immersive as Mueller’s contributions.

Sometimes the chaos promised by the show’s title is playfully literal, as in Schaefer’s “Bank of America in Flames, Five Points” a picture of a blazing suburban bank branch likely inspired by Edward Ruscha’s 1968 “Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire” (which is in the Hirshhorn’s collection). Matthew Clarke Davis offers two takes on a realistic mountainscape, but the second inverts the colors unnaturally. A glitch can be just another way of seeing.

Bob Burgess, “Santa Monica” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

NO PEOPLE APPEAR IN BOB BURGESS’S PICTURES, but should anyone amble in, she or he will have a place to sit. In “Encounters,” the photographer’s Washington Printmakers Gallery show, chairs serve as surrogates for humans. They populate elegantly composed pictures that are characterized by vivid colors, often discovered as large tracts or slabs of a single hue. In these photos, the world is often a found color-field painting.

The dominant color is often red, as in the case of the all-scarlet chair, table, and wall of “Bistro,” or the text-less crimson sign that foregrounds “Port Racine,” whose backdrop is a vivid azure sky. Even more painting-like is “Santa Monica,” whose gradated aqua expanse is punctuated by a vertical bar that appears to a metal drainpipe. Burgess is also drawn to the absence of hue, most wittily in “The Gallery,” which documents a white partition with no art hung on it, but with pale-blue light glowing coolly behind it.

The artist is not averse to scenes that tell a story. One picture observes a commercial building onto which some starstruck artist has rendered Mount Rushmore with an added fifth face -- not Trump, but Elvis. Another depicts a silvery truck that reflects the cloud-puffed sky that surrounds it, and into which it seems to be traveling. The sense of immersion is apt, for Burgess’s photos can be seen as plunges into pools of luxuriant color.

Van Pulley, “Of the People -- At a Distance” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

FLAGS, SMALL TOWNS, AND WASHINGTON’S MONUMENTS are heavily featured in “America 250,” the semiquincentennial exhibition at Multiple Exposures Gallery. Juried by Andy Holtin, the show includes pictures by 11 of MEG’s 13 photographers. The selection includes views of the Mall and environs that gently tweak traditional postcard scenes: Soonin Ham spies flags in midair, fluttering improbably above clouds, and Stacy Smith Evans captures a dome -- the Capitol’s, presumably -- as a deformed reflection in water.

The most striking photos suggest that something’s off about the celebration. Van Pulley’s “Of the People -- At a Distance” gazes at Lafayette Square Park, a public space since 1804, through the lattice of a metal fence that prevents access. The U.S. flag in Sarah Hood Salomon’s “American Dreams” hangs in the doorway of a weathered storefront that appears to be abandoned. More whimsically, Evans finds another rustic shop facade where the crisis is only temporary: “Gone to Dentist / Return ASAP,” reads a hand-lettered sign that promises an imminent revival of normality.

Joan Dreyer, “Reading Nutrition” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

CLOTH AND PAPER ARE THE PRINCIPAL MATERIALS employed by New Image Artists, a local group founded in 1980. The 11 current members are showing work in various media and at a range of scales in “Story Cloths and the Book.” Several of the most striking pieces in the Athenaeum show transmute books into eloquent but illegible objects.

Dominating the main gallery is Candace Edgerley’s “Winged Flight,” a large pair of white-tufted wings fixed on the wall near the top of the high-ceilinged room, as if ascending. Quilted in shades of black, gray, and bronze, Dominie Nash’s “Foliated Calligraphy” arrays abstracted leaves in a format reminiscent of a Japanese scroll. Linda Colsh’s “Elsewhere” is a mostly black quilt with repeated iterations of the same small figure in a long coat, interspersed with words such as “brouillard” (French for “fog”) and “miasma.” The piece seems to gaze into the past through the mists of time.

Colsh’s text is cryptic but, ironically, easier to read than that in several book-based pieces. Joan Dreyer’s playful “Reading Nutrition” pulps book pages into a sort of flour to yield a loaf of sliced bread, studded with phrases. B.J. Adams’s “Once Read, Not Forgotten” is a construction of 48 clumps of fanned pages, in alternating horizontal and vertical alignments. Saaraliisa Ylitalo’s “Disconnected” is a circle of tightly spaced pages, dyed blue at the top. Words yield to patterns, losing their meaning and yet still making visual sense.

Wayson R. Jones, “A Mountain by Myself (After Gilliam)” (Hemphill Artworks)

TEXTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ESSENTIAL to Wayson R. Jones’s paintings, but somewhere along the way it got upstaged by color. Once a purveyor of impastoed monochromatic abstractions, the local artist now makes pictures that pop with ardent greens and oranges. His latest exhibition, “The Full Moon Is My Girlfriend,” is viewable only via Hemphill Artworks’s website, so the painter’s sculptural use of pumice gel is hard to appreciate. But the vivid acrylic hues transmit just fine across the web.

Jones’s compositions have also evolved. Formerly in the mode of 1960s color-field painting, they more recently trended toward abstracted landscapes. This new set of artworks marks another shift: The pictures seem to portray surreal imaginary creatures, as suggested by such titles as “God Lamprey” and “Pink-Hooded Figure, Facing Away.” The inspirations for the vaguely animal-like or humanoid forms include masks and African and Amerindian ritual figures, not everyday people. Rather than set out to portray such fanciful beings as “Yellow Bird of Existential Grief,” Jones allows them to emerge intuitively from experiments with color and shape.

Two of the pieces are the result of a different sort of experimentation. Made of brightly tinted shreds of paper rather than pumice and pigment, these collages are as colorful as the other pictures, but feel airier and appear more luminous. The title of “A Mountain by Myself (After Gilliam)” indicates a debt to Sam Gilliam, who’s best known for using the stained-paint technique of earlier Washington colorists while abandoning flatness for canvases that were creased and draped. Jones’s break with his previous style may not be quite so bold as Gilliam’s, but it does demonstrate the artist’s restlessly ongoing evolution.

Glitchscape

Through July 25 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Bob Burgess: Encounters

Through July 26 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

America 250

Through July 26 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com; 703-683-2205.

Story Cloths and the Book: Work by New Image Artists

Through July 26 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Wayson R. Jones: The Full Moon Is My Girlfriend

Through July 25 at Hemphill Artworks online. hemphillfinearts.com. 202-234-5601.

“Chromatic Scales” installation view (photo by Vivian Doering)

SUITABLY AND SATISFYINGLY EYE-POPPING, the mostly hard-edged color-field artworks now at PFA’s Kensington location reach back to the 1960s for strategies that remain potent today. There are two ‘60s pieces in the show, which contains a single entry by each of 11 artists. The oldest is a handsome 1965 study in color -- green, aqua, yellow, and centered lavender -- and geometric shape by Paul Reed, who was the last surviving original Washington colorist when he died in 2015. All but one of the other items were made since 2018.

However recent, the art seems to draw more than formal gambits from the ‘60s; it also shares the era’s directness, exuberance, and sense of optimism. Beverly Fishman’s sleek, multi-piece sculptural painting even partakes of the spirit of pop art, hinting wordlessly at commercial signage. Among the other high-gloss pieces are one of veteran local sculptor Mimi Herbert’s elegant constructions of molded plastic sheets, with hot pink atop paler yellow and pink; and Li Trincere’s dynamic arrangement of four red near-parallelograms, shadowed in silver, on a tapered canvas.

Two of the artists cunningly arrange colored squares: Robert Swain positions them on a single canvas, where the hues move from light to dark and cold to hot; Liane Nouri charts six single-color panels that shift from dark blue to light green, a procession jauntily interrupted by a yellow interloper. Ever so slightly looser, Tom McGlynn’s painting arranges eight not-quite-square pure-color rectangles on a neutral gray field.

The second oldest piece, Marcia Hafif’s mostly gold 1968 painting, is the only entry that features mottled color. But Ruth Pastine’s bright-red picture seeps softly darker along the sides, echoing Leon Berkowitz’s more epic transitions. Red or pink feature in most of these paintings and sculptures, even the one that at first seems incongruously monochromatic. Ken Weathersby places a pair of toothed abstract forms in opposition, bristling in black on white. Between the two, and barely visible, is a thin line of smudgy pink. It’s a reminder that all these coolly precise artworks are animated by warm hues.

Jackie Dobranski, “Sorry Charlie” (detail) (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A TYPICALLY ECLECTIC ARRAY, the latest installment of Windows on Wisconsin features painting, sculpture, and prints. Considering that the venue is a series of shop windows, viewable 24-7, the most appropriate entries in the 14-artist “WOW 12” are surely Taina Litwak and Jackie Dobranski’s found-object assemblages.

Litwak’s window-filling piece is “Plastic Tsunami,” a version of which was previously shown at I&A at Hillyer. This cascade of consumer-product detritus, each of the hundreds of items painted a nondescript gray, surges through the space as if about to overflow the building and swamp the nearby luxury emporiums.

A contemplation of her own biological clock, Dobranski’s “Sorry Charlie” is a clear-plastic female torso filled with symbols of fertility, including toy vending-machine capsules that contain babies. Syringes represent hormone therapy and IVF, while a clock that features former Starkist mascot Charlie the Tuna offers the title’s mocking apology. Time, the spokes-fish warns, waits for no woman.

In nearby display windows, nature is refracted into many forms. Margery Goldberg’s trio of wooden sculptures, two of which feature human faces, celebrate the qualities of their material. Mauricio Athie’s prints don’t initially appear to be representational yet actually depict the interior of squash, a key crop in the artist’s native Mexico. Suzanne Yurdin’s “Katy’s Garden,” a painting on unstretched canvas, abstractly portrays nature’s fecundity. Misia Broadhead indulges a more fabulist disposition, painting landscapes in which small animals gambol with fairies.

A pair of Andrew Wohl paintings that boldly contrast red and green have a pop-art swagger. But these renderings of explosions were inspired not by consumer packaging but by Trump’s threats to Iran. Time, in the case of these artworks, has proved Wohl grimly prescient.

Leslie Clarke, “Nepal at Large” (Touchstone Gallery)

LESLEY CLARKE AND ANICE HOACHLANDER specialize in different media, but their interests overlap so much that they were able to collaborate on three pictures. These artworks, with Clarke’s encaustic gestures atop Hoachlander’s photographs, hang at the intersection of the local artists’s otherwise separate Touchstone Gallery shows.

With a background as an architectural photographer, Hoachlander has an affinity for studies of structure. The images in her “Nature as Architect” range from trees to flowers to expanses of fungi, the last photographed with a macro lens. Some of the pictures of smaller objects emphasize repeated patterns, or employ narrow depth of field to render gauzy everything but a lone crisp region or detail. The canny technique draws the eye into the recesses of flowers and leaves, offering a seemingly privileged view.

Other pictures are more environmental, literally. Made at South Carolina’s Lake Marion, a series titled “Water’s Edge” observes trees that emerge from water, sometimes to be drenched in moss and mist. These soft swathes match the milky light, conjuring a world that looks real but feels dream-like.

While mountains and waterfalls appear in Clarke’s “Echoes of Place,” the artist shares Hochlander’s eye for detail. Inspired by travels in Croatia, Iceland, Nepal, and Scotland, Clarke makes sumptuously textured paintings whose layers of encaustic wax unify images that seem to be constructed from fragments.

The larger paintings are the most realistic, while smaller ones are more abstracted, representing “how memories soften, shift, and distill into feeling,” according to the artist’s statement. The pictures have a geologic quality that’s bolstered by the pebbles or glassy stones occasionally incorporated into them. One piece is just a circle of tightly arrayed stones from Iceland, as if to prove the concreteness of places that Clarke transmutes into visual reveries.

Nick Anderson, “Gerrymandering” (Amy Kaslow Gallery

CRANKY, CAUSTIC, AND ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED, the political cartoons in Amy Kaslow Gallery’s “What’s So Funny” present a cavalcade of villains, with just a few heroes. For every image in which the late Congressman John Lewis serves as a bridge to Black enfranchisement, commentators Nick Anderson and Mike Luckovich offer a dozen withering likenesses of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk and -- most ghoulish of all -- Stephen Miller.

Anderson and Luckovich are syndicated cartoonists who continue their trade during the twilight of metropolitan daily newspapers. What they’re showing here are mostly prints, colorized and otherwise enhanced, of published cartoons. The selection also includes 13 of Luckovich’s originals, which are black-and-white and about half the size of the prints.

Of the full-color offerings, Anderson’s tend to be more detailed and more subtly shaded and hued. Anderson also delivers one of the few bipartisan blasts, an M.C. Escher-inspired denunciation of gerrymandering that gives equal weight to Republican and Democratic efforts to shape electoral districts in their favor. But Trump and his enablers are, inevitably, the focus of most of these quick-take commentaries. After all, as smartly encapsulated by Luckovich’s picture of Jan. 6 rioters swarming out of Trump’s mouth, our current national crisis mostly emanates from one man’s loose lips.

LANDSCAPES TURN DRAMATIC AND EVEN EERIE when stripped of color in “Seeing in Black and White,” a 13-artist Photoworks show. Some of the locations, such as Niagara Falls, are inherently formidable, but William Dusterwald makes an especially memorable image by highlighting explosive mists above the cataract. Other scenes are distinguished by the play of light: Alan Simmons captures a tree in an enchantment of ghostly illumination, which pulls it visually from a dark wooded backdrop. Carl de Moor gazes out from the shadows, shooting from underneath a charismatically battered pier.

Two other contributors set off sweeping scenes with piquant details. Tom Sliter offers three studies of dunes rippled by small ridges, but only one includes a tuft of grass, a small detail with large pictorial impact. The sharpest juxtaposition is in Craig Nedrow’s view of three swans on a lake on whose far side sits a belching industrial complex. The picture is notable for its rich middle tones, but also for its vision of serene nature in the shadow of manmade ruination.

Chromatic Scales

Through July 11 at PFA, 4228 Howard Ave., Kensington. pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

WOW 12

Through July 12 at 5500-5510 Wisconsin Ave., Chevy Chase. Info: kirstylittle9@gmail.com.

Lesley Clarke: Echoes of Place

Anice Hoachlander: Nature as Architect

Through July 12 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

Nick Anderson and Mike Luckovich: What’s So Funny?

Through July 19 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Seeing in Black and White

Through July 12 at Photoworks, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo. glenechophotoworks.org. 301-634-2274.

Leslie Rose, “Red and Yellow Tent” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

FOOD MARKETS BECOME BOTH VAGUE AND VIVID in Leslie Rose’s prints, displayed as “Street Markets: Relief Prints and Reduction Screenprints.” Visitors to Washington Printmakers Gallery who move from left to right will ultimately encounter a few photos from which the local artist derived these pictures. While these are instructive, Rose is far from a photorealist. She partly abstracts the scenes she depicts, giving them a dream-like quality.

The markets glimpsed in these prints are in Asia or Latin America, although the only non-photographic hints of that are such titles as “Hong Kong Night Market.” Rose flattens the imagery and overlaps or intentionally misaligns the images to achieve a mysterious slipperiness. The visual drama is intensified by black areas, from which details emerge as if discerned by eyes that just adjusted to the darkness.

There’s not much bustle in the hushed scenarios, which include one in which a man has time to have a drink in his stall. The exception is “Street Scene,” a rare vertical composition whose subject matter is especially unclear. The upright elements in this brown-and-green picture could be either trees or buildings, portrayed with a jittery energy that recalls Futurism. It’s a sleepy night at the street market, yet this rendering is wide awake.

Kai Jones, “Blanched” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE WORK IN THIS YEAR’S “BETHESDA PAINTING AWARDS” is almost all representational, but that doesn’t mean it’s traditional. Among the eight winners of the 22nd annual regional competition, juried by Mira Hecht, Ernest Shaw, and Hilary Wilder, only one is fully an abstractionist. D.C.’s Thomas Bunnell makes colorfully patterned pictures that suggest cellular forms, capable of reproducing themselves endlessly. A different sort of patterning characterizes the semi-abstract work of Sally Bowring, a Richmond artist whose pictures feature color blocks and silhouetted shapes that resemble goblets and flasks.

Iconic and even mythic portraits of Black people are the speciality of Baltimore’s Monica Ikegwu (who took the top prize) and D.C.’s Kai Jones. Both artists are modernist realists, but Jones’s work refers more directly to Old Master painting. In his grandly emotional “Blanched,” a Black youth surfs on a large shell he might have borrowed from Botticelli’s Venus.

There’s a similar romanticism to the paintings of Baltimore’s Julia Gould, although the moments she portrays are contemporary and everyday. In one picture, a woman and two dogs commune in a forest bathed in eerie red light. (The image looks like a homage to the cover of Echo and the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles, although that’s probably inadvertent.) Richmond painter-collagist Minh Trang Hu?nh also depicts commonplace scenes, but with a turbulent past revealed by old photos and war images.

Two of the featured artists, both from Richmond, have been reviewed in DisCerning Eye recently. Elizabeth Coffey overlays text and lace over female faces to represent layers of identity. Jeffrey Deane Hall makes trompe l’oeil paintings of objects, mostly books, to suggest the limits of understanding. His wittiest picture here highlights the word “Zen” while obscuring the rest of the title: “and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

Rick Bach, “Cut” installation view (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE NAME OF RICK BACH’S IA&A at Hillyer exhibition, “Cut,” describes only the first part of the D.C. artist’s process. As the son of the owner of a Pittsburgh auto-body shop, Bach was inspired to work with steel that’s plasma-cut and usually painted. He assembles the pieces of curve-edged metal into abstract assemblage-sculptures that retain an industrial feel even while the individual parts emulate natural forms.

Most of the pieces in this show are homages to -- or parodies of -- abstract paintings. Bach piles several levels of steel filigree atop canvas-like metal boxes that are usually painted a single color. There’s also a wall of nearly 100 “Seeds,” small versions of the larger works that take their power from regularity and repetition.

Although muscular and vividly hued, the painting-like wall sculptures aren’t as dynamic as Bach’s freestanding creations, most of them narrow and tapered pyramids. Fixed in place yet thrusting toward the ceiling, these towers have a sense of potential motion that honors their automotive origins.

Also at IA&A is “Abandonware [houses],” Tara Youngborg’s tribute, of sorts, to the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad, a brief-lived 19th-century railway in Maryland and Delaware. The artist, who manages the Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, is not offering a literal history lesson. Her installation consists of a room-filling web of twisted cables; a diaphanous white box onto which images are projected; and an echoey, stuttery sound collage.

The piece’s title suggests parallels with obsolete computer software, which --like an abandoned right-of-way -- becomes unfunctional but doesn’t altogether disappear. While all human-forged networks decay, many leave ghostly traces.

Noël Kassewitz, “What Remains” installation view (photo by Mei Matute)

TRANSFORMER HAS BEEN PAINTED A SUITABLE BLUE for “What Remains,” a show by ocean-focused D.C. artist Noël Kassewitz. It dovetails with one in April and May at Siren Arts, Transformer’s New Jersey affiliate. Many of the pieces are paintings, rendered in a realistic but streamlined style. Subjects range from damaged Roman sculptures -- Kassewitz is a sculpture conservator at the National Gallery of Art -- to fishing nets that float in water, here looking more like found patterns than maritime threats.

Kassewitz doesn’t just gaze at water. She engages with it in various ways, from performance pieces to salvaging manmade objects from the depths. A few such items have been placed into an assemblage that’s as tidy as the nearby paintings.

The show’s third element is a series of small sculptures, mostly made of glass and primarily depicting human hands. Two of the hands are in shades of translucent blue that complement the overall color scheme. These mirror a small painting of a pair of hands, submerged in water and seen through ripples. Water is all around, and also deep within.

Bart Dluhy, “Take it from Here” (Foundry Gallery)

THE TEXTURES RANGE FROM SOFT PIGMENT TO HARD METAL at Foundry Gallery, whose “New Member Showcase” introduces four artists. The most gauzy imagery is by Luisa Zanforlin, whose paintings usually depict two people side by side, (One picture has three.) The haziness of the artist’s style suggests loss and longing, as do the poses of her subjects. They stare past or away from each other, and never return the viewer’s gaze. There’s something missing here, Zanforlin hints evocatively.

Deborah Maklowski’s relief-sculpture collages are inspired by landscape, but as conjured out of someone’s jewelry box. Black whorls cover Susanne Kamalieh’s mixed-media pictures, whose patterns are meant to represent skies. Through the air currents such unexpected things as a pair of human legs can occasionally be glimpsed.

The most intriguing work is by Bart Dluhy, whose all-over abstract paintings array rings, blotches, and mysterious glyphs on wooden panels. These planks are incised with lines and seemingly battered, so that the pictures resemble excavated artifacts. The artist’s compositions demonstrate a jazzy rhythm and a sophisticated color sense, with flashes of vivid hues on subdued grounds. Dluhy calls attention to the surface while alluding to unseen depths.

Leslie Rose: Street Markets: Relief Prints and Reduction Screenprints

Through June 28 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Bethesda Painting Awards

Through June 28 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.

Rick Bach: Cut

Tara Youngborg: Abandonware [houses]

Through June 28 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Noël Kassewitz: What Remains

Through July 4 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.

New Members Showcase

Through June 28 at Foundry Gallery, 2118 8th St. NW. foundrygallery.org. 202- 232-0203.

Paul Myoda “Poly-Perspective: Warped Plane” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A FEATURE OF TRADITIONAL JAPANESE ROOMS, a tokonoma is a recessed area designed not for storage but for the display of artworks. Four of the sculptures in Paul Myoda’s “Poly-Perspectives,” all of which have the show’s name as their primary title, are subtitled “Tokonoma” (sometimes followed by a number). While the reference is not literal, this Spilt Gallery exhibition is indeed keyed to space, confined by arrays of metal rods but opened by light.

A U.S.-born artist of Japanese heritage, Myoda teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island. He makes sculptures that appear industrial, yet are inspired by nature as well as architecture and theoretical geometry. Mounted on poles or on the wall, the sleek copper-and-brass constructions usually incorporate LEDs that cast intricate shadows. The sculptures appear simultaneously hard and soft, solid and illusory.

Myoda teaches drawing as well as sculpture, and these pieces are, in a sense, both. The straight-lined poly-perspectives resemble mathematical illustrations or sketches of high-tech machines; these affinities are especially discernible in the four sculptures that don’t have built-in illumination. Yet ambient light endows even these four pieces with vast networks of shadows. By rendering his lattices with metal shafts in space rather than ink or pencil on paper, Myoda assures that they’ll be complicated by their environs.

Robin Croft, “Anxious Insect (After Kafka)” (Fred Schnider Gallery of Art)

THE CENTERPIECE OF ROBIN CROFT’S “A Concise Retrospective” is a large creature, dubbed an “anxious insect,” made of readymade aluminum and steel parts. The sculpture is not as regular as one of Myoda’s metal frameworks, but it’s tidier than many of the entries in Croft’s Fred Schnider Gallery of Art show. The Northern Virginia artist sometimes takes a surrealist’s delight in juxtaposing random objects and ideas.

Thus “Fête de tête,” which balances a chalice and a teapot on an askew tray at the top of a seemingly rickety assemblage whose axis is a metal crutch. Like “Anxious Insect (After Kafka),” the sculpture is made entirely of silvery metal. But where one emulates an organic creature, the other is exuberantly unnatural.

This survey of Croft’s work from 1988 to 2022 includes drawings, rendered with ink and pencil. The pictures portray stylized humans, notably the bleeding body that stretches across three panels of circa-2020 societal chaos in “Reclining figure triptych.” Yet the drawings also depict tools and mechanisms, as if these are inseparable from their users and creators.

Transformation and motion are integral to the show, which features two sculptures on wheels. “Perpetual motion machine (Sisyphus machine)” is constructed in part of metal plates embellished with truncated numbers and is perched on a wooden chassis, ready to be tugged like a giant pull toy. Unfunctional yet imposing, the device has the strength of its own absurdity.

John Thomas Paradiso, “Bicep Pansy” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ARCHETYPAL MALE AND STEREOTYPICAL FEMALE unite in the mixed-media assemblages of John Thomas Paradiso. The local artist (and Portico Gallery at Studio 3907 proprietor) is known for combining photography and embroidery to represent the complexity of gay-male culture. “Sexual Tensions: Nightmares and Daydreams,” his Artists & Makers show, includes examples of his recent output, which incorporates flowers, hyper-macho poses, and yellow caution tape. But the exhibition also reaches back almost four decades to showcase pieces that will likely be less familiar to D.C. area viewers.

The older work (some of which is sexually explicit) was made during the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis and features what appears to be autobiographical content. “Medicine Cabinet” is filled with pill bottles, many of them sporting the artist’s face. There’s also an ominous vibe to “The Hunt,” a wall sculpture with a wooden cross-piece that’s bedpost on one end, rifle butt on the other -- although that butt could just be a playful reference to a part of the male anatomy also featured in the hybrid construction.

The more recent items are more directly celebratory. The artist submerges photos of nude men under crocheted doilies and overlays muscle-flaunting guys on pansies, a flower whose name was once used as an anti-gay slur. The individual components range from offhand to carefully crafted, but all are put together meticulously. Paradiso’s layered collages may wink impishly at the viewer, but they’re fabricated with utmost seriousness.

Fred Zafran, “Just Passing Through_04” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

ONE PHOTOGRAPH IN FRED ZAFRAN’S Multiple Exposures exhibition spies a directional sign for Hama-rikyu Gardens, a Tokyo park whose origin dates to the 17th century. But the Northern Virginia artist doesn’t head there, or to any other site that evokes Japan’s traditional culture. Many of the pictures instead focus on features that could be in London, New York City, or Dubai -- generic urbanism for the rootless global nomad. The show’s title is “Just Passing Through,” and Zafran further seeks to conjure a feeling of transitoriness by photographing through windows or screens to convey the vantage of someone who’s outside looking in.

Several photos depict train stations or railroad overpasses, and the signage is, of course, partly in Japanese. Zafran also offers glimpses of such characteristically Japanese sights as a bank of drink vending machines and a lineup of bicycles beneath a bridge’s metallic span. But the pictures depict just two upscale areas of central Tokyo, near the harbor, where most of the buildings are recent and in the sleek, bland international style.

Made during the winter of 2024, and often at night, these photographs depict a city that’s bustling but bundled up -- even the locals are transient, headed for well-heated refuges. The chill seems metaphorical as well as palpable, as if the whole city is giving visitors the cold shoulder. Yet Tokyo is a city of light, and that profuse illumination -- soft or harsh, direct or refracted -- provides a sense of enchantment. Zafran is just passing through, but it appears he’d like to linger.

Jessica Drenk, “Aggregate Stone 5” (Adah Rose Gallery)

THE DISPOSABLE BECOMES MONUMENTAL, seemingly, in Jessica Drenk’s recent sculptures, exhibited alongside some older work at Adah Rose Gallery. The show, “that is a made place, created by light,” features several wall pieces that appear to be excavated chunks of stone -- jagged, creased, and striated. The sculptures are actually made of junk mail that’s been pressed together and then carved and sanded. The upstate New York artist transmutes mass-produced trash into objects that pay homage, playfully yet respectfully, to the natural world.

Drenk prefers basic ingredients that are modest, commonplace, and manufactured. In one of the older pieces, she abrades multiple lengths of white PVC pipe into a sort of tectonic map of an imaginary hillscape. In another, she turns old books into what appears to be a ringed slice of a tree, symbolically rewinding the volumes into their original substance. A 2025 creation revisits the artist’s earlier transformations of clumps of tightly bunched pencils into hollow, shell-like forms.

The artist is mostly concerned with material and metamorphosis, but one recent sculpture introduces another factor. “Compression 14” consists of slabs of abandoned books, pressed together into a series of undulating valleys and peaks, all contained by a rectangular wooden frame. Because the pages are arrayed at different depths, stray bits of text are legible. The result is mostly ribbons of squashed pulp, but also contains glimpses of ideas.

Willem de Looper, “Untitled (Window Series)” (Hemphill Artworks)

MADE OVER 22 YEARS, THE 13 PAINTINGS in “Evolution of an Artist” show Willem De Looper’s continuing fascination with swirling color. The Dutch-born abstractionist, who ascended from a guard to chief curator at the Phillips Collection, was a Washington colorist, if not exactly a member of any school. He adapted the technique of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, whose diluted acrylic pigments seeped into untreated canvas.

The formal problem de Looper ponders in these untitled all-over pictures, on exhibit at Hemphill Artworks’s website only, is the transition from one hue to the next. The earliest painting, from 1966, overlays streams of translucent colors, each rivulet well defined yet blending into others in places. The second one, made a year later, sets off brightly hued petals with black outlines in the manner of a stained-glass window.

After that, de Looper’s style becomes softer and more fluid, a look achieved by pouring successive gushes of paint. Some of the later pictures do include lines of various sorts, from the curving horizontal bands of a mostly blue 1980 painting to the short green stitches and the sketchy frame, respectively, of ones made in 1983 and 1987. With the latter work, the most recent in this selection, de Looper returns -- by accident, most likely -- to the strategy of that stained-glass-like 1967 painting. Rather than fill the canvas with bold color, he fixes vivid details within a near-black expanse. The effect is electric: The hot reds and intense blues flash like neon in the darkness.

Paul Myoda: Poly-Perspectives

Through July 3 at Spilt Gallery, 2529 P St. NW. spiltdc.com.

Robin Croft: A Concise Retrospective

Through June 28 at Fred Schnider Gallery of Art, 888 N. Quincy St., Arlington. fredschnidergalleryofart.com. 301-852-8042.

Fred Zafran: Just Passing Through

Through June 28 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

John Thomas Paradiso: Sexual Tensions: Nightmares and Daydreams

Through June 24 at Artists & Makers, 11810 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. artistsandmakersstudios.com. 240-437-9573.

Jessica Drenk: that is a made place, created by light

Through June 28 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162.

Willem De Looper: Evolution of an Artist

Through June 27 at Hemphill Artworks online. hemphillfinearts.com. 202-234-5601.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1992; Shah Garg Collection; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; Courtesy of Cheim & Read; Photo by Brian Buckley

JANET SOBEL’S UNTITLED 1946 PAINTING, the oldest piece in “Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection,” fits neatly into the history of 20th-century American abstraction. It looks rather European, which shouldn’t surprise, since Sobel lived the first 15 years of her life in Ukraine. If the vibrant all-over canvas seems to presage abstract expressionism, Sobel’s work was acknowledged by Jackson Pollock as an influence on his style.

Whatever its historical significance, the picture is not characteristic of this National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition. But then neither is any other of the entries. This ambitiously unruly show is unified by just two things: All 80 items were made since 1945, and all 68 artists are women. The variety reflects the eclectic taste of Komal Shah and her husband, Gaurav Garg, California art collectors and tech-industry veterans.

Curated by Cecilia Alemani, “Making Their Mark” has been labeled a show of abstract art. That’s not entirely true. The exhibition does open with a late example of abstract expressionism, suggestive of a sun-drenched garden, made by Joan Mitchell just before her 1992 death. The diptych is one of the largest works (and probably one of the most valuable) in the selection, as well as a reminder that Mitchell was among the most successful of Pollock’s female peers. But Sobel and Mitchell’s paintings are the only examples of mid-century abstraction.

The show is divided into seven sections that highlight thematic, stylistic, or material links. These categories encompass video, craft-based, text-driven art, as well as more conventional genres.

While there’s no realist work, more than a few pieces are representational: Emma Amos’s 1982 fabric collage places a silhouetted female figure in a cosmic setting. Maria Lassnig’s 2000 painting depicts a “green paintress,” also in silhouette. Another fabric collage, made by Tschabalala Self in 2021, renders a pair of “Sisters.” Firelei Báez’s 2018 paintings are speculative and symbolic portraits of a pair of 19th-century Haitian princesses, placed in opulent frames. Both Simone Fattal and Rose B. Simpson offer sculptures of streamlined human bodies, rendered in bronze and mixed-media, respectively.

Elizabeth Murray’s 1990-91 “Joanne in the Canyon,” a painting on a shaped canvas, doesn’t literally portray her friend, experimental theater director JoAnne Akalaitis. But it does hint at the Southwestern landscapes through which Akalaitis liked to hike.

Shah and Garg collect art from many areas, but California is well represented. There’s just one piece from L.A.’s 1960s “finish fetish” scene, a sleekly machine-like sculptural abstraction fabricated by Judy Chicago in 1960. But there are later works in the same tradition, notably Helen Pashgian’s translucent orange plastic tube, made in 2009, and Aria Dean’s seemingly punched-in column of high-density foam, 3D-modeled in 2022 and painted the exact color as a Hollywood green screen.

More traditional in technique, if not form, are eight glazed-stoneware forms made between 1960 and 1998 by ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu. The Hawaii-born Japanese-American is one of the show’s several “craft” artists who make things that are defiantly unfunctional.

“V. Speculum,” Jo Baer’s stark yet playful 1970 painting of two gray triangles at the edges of an off-white field, may be the only artwork that qualifies as minimalist. (Baer began her artistic career in L.A., although she lived elsewhere for most of her life.) But several works could be termed post-minimalist, including Samia Halaby’s trio of “kinetic paintings,” programmed on an Amiga computer in 1987; and Howardene Pindell’s gridded 2022 collage, constructed from thousands of paper chads produced by a hole punch.

There are as many conceptual paths through this array as there are repeated forms in another striking example of post-minimalism, Françoise Grossen’s “Contact III,” which consists of 17 red-rope lattices hung in a row. Still, since the show opens with Mitchell’s 1950s-style picture, it’s tempting to follow a route that leads through the evolution of painting.

This itinerary leads to two works, poured and peeled by Lynda Benglis in 1969 and Suzanne Jackson in 2020, that are all dried pigment, skin-like with no canvas or paper below. Along the same trail is Rosemarie Castoro’s stark 1972 paint-less “brushstroke,” applied to board with gesso, marble dust, and other materials; and Mary Weatherford’s 2015 “The Tempest,” a vibrant, mostly blue blot that’s bisected by a vertical white-neon tube.

The glowing tube evokes Dan Flavin’s light sculptures, much as the bicycle wheel attached to Laura Owens’s 2016 collage-painting recalls Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Such references, however, don’t limit the scope or inventiveness of “Making Their Mark.” These 80 artworks derive from many sources, and point in even more directions.

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

Through July 26 at National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. nmwa.org. 202-783-5000.

Kathryn Camicia, untitled (Studio Gallery)

THERE’S A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE to Kathryn Camicia’s paintings, even though they’re entirely abstract. The local artist is sufficiently attuned to words to have taken the title of her Studio Gallery show, “All That Is Wanted Is Time,” from a John Asbery poem. Yet she left untitled all but one of the pictures, which were curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum. The exception offers a clue: “Calanais” is named for a Neolithic-era edifice of standing megaliths in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

The upright gestures in that painting do have a stony quality, seemingly the result of being scraped out of black blobs of paint. But Camicia’s style is mostly soft and fluid, and sometimes features drips, although its watery textures may be offset by areas of glossy latex paint. Most of the pictures have hit red-orange backdrops and often included feathered gestures that evoke plants more than rocks.

Yet the horizontal paintings often suggest landscapes, albeit ones whose textures defy nature. A trio of black forms stand defiantly, yet are nearly diaphanous, more like clouds than stones. Another picture is dominated by a cloud-like shape, but one rendered in olive-green -- punctuated by a blood-red block -- that suggests earth or hill. For Camicia, the limited certainties of the physical world are overpowered by the endless possibilities of paint.

THE WORLD IS A SERIES OF ELEGANT FOUND PATTERNS in the pictures made by Scott Robinson. A veteran photojournalist, the local artist has traveled the world, capturing such striking images as “Sunset in the Sahara,” in which a lone figure walks in the tracks left by multiple tires in an expanse of red sand. A solitary person and areas of vivid red are among the defining features of “A Collection of Photographs by Scott Robinson,” another Studio Gallery show.

Some of the repeated motifs in these pictures are funky: a series of battered red and orange corrugated metal sheets linked into a barrier, a wall of multi-layered political graffiti behind a solo saxophonist. Others are sleek and uniform: the curved checkerboard facing of a tunnel, the alternating green and black panels of a modernist behemoth. There are also designs drawn merely with light, such as the vast and seemingly unbroken swoops produced by automobile lights on a highway or the dagger of sunlight that harshly illuminates part of a seated person. Like most of the people in Robinson’s photos, the seated figure appears incidental to environments that enthrall and overwhelm.

ELEGANT FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS FIXED IN CIRCLES, the six photographs in Leslie Kiefer’s turn a few twigs, leaves, or petals into miniature universes. The artist’s “Bowl/ing,” also at Studio and curated by Iza Thomas and Robert Cwiok, observes plant matter in various degrees of spring-like vitality or autumnal decay. Each grouping is arrayed in a bowl whose circular form gives the picture a sense of infinity. The depths of such serene composition as “Orchid Party” even suggest an eye -- gazing out as the viewer peers in.

Felipe Castelblanco, “Driftless” (VisArts)

TO MARK THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF ITS “FRAME AND FREQUENCY” video-art surveys, VisArts has mounted two exhibitions. The five-artist “Frame and Frequency X” is smaller and themeless, while the six-contributor “Liquid Territories” is larger and, however loosely, themed. Both showcase mostly video, but sometimes in association with other art forms.

Thus Dawn Whitmore’s “There and back again,” part of the smaller show, nestles two videos among paintings, one of them a large canvas whose representational images are montaged in a cinematic manner. Nearby, Jessye McDowell uses futuristic game-generation software to offer a parody of marketing for a futuristic AI companion; the video makes such products seem as banal as they ominous. The other entries include Liz Trosper’s animated eco-disaster tour, which depicts a burning tree and an ocean full of trash; and João Krefer’s intentionally disorienting short video of metropolitan Tokyo, composed of literal tracking shots -- shot from a train -- that are split horizontally with the lower set of images presented upside down.

“Liquid Territories” is more sweeping, as exemplified by its centerpiece, Felipe Castelblanco’s “Driftless.” Made over six years, the three-screen video observes a single person who navigates a primitive raft -- also on display -- through such diverse locations as an inlet overlooked by snowy peaks and a tight Venetian canal. If the bulk of the video appears mythic and timeless, the final sequence is specific and gently comic: It consists of TV footage of a scramble to arrest the artist as he paddles through a medium-sized American city.

Kissel Hiram Bravo Hernández’s mixed-format “Fire Warning” is a vision of an atrophying world, with forests on fire and buildings rotting like overripe vegetables, all depicted with a viewpoint in constant flux. Dwayne LeBlanc’s “You Don’t Exist” ponders migration and mixed identities with voiceover narration atop soft black-and-white imagery of clouds and an airplane in flight. Leigh Davis nestles a video of everyday female-coded activities -- vacuuming, applying makeup -- inside an installation that arrays green benches and a red telephone, evoking some sort of waiting room.

Local artist Jonathan Monaghan places two video screens within digital prints of elaborate frames for another of his elegant mashups of myth and reality, history and contemporary consumer culture. The looped short videos were inspired by the fable of Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humans and was punished by having his liver perpetually eaten by an eagle. In Monaghan’s twofold retelling, one figure is chained to a computer server rack and Prometheus’s vulnerability is expressed by a lineup of Naked juices. Myth, like history, repeats itself -- the first time as tragedy, the second time as a marketing opportunity.

Susan R. Johnson, “Small Combine No. 6 (Cool Cat)” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)

FOR HER RECENT COLLAGE-PAINTINGS, Susan R. Johnson has abandoned her former strategy of combining idealized women’s bodies with sleek mid-20th-century machines. That idea hasn’t been entirely forgotten, however. The southern-Maryland artist’s Gallery Neptune & Brown show is titled “Blueprint for Happiness,” an advertising slogan for Silex coffee makers. Silex merged into Proctor Silex in 1960, which gives a sense of the era Johnson means to evoke: the United States during her childhood and its triumphant post-WWII economic boom, before the discontents of the late 1960s.

One of those discontents, of course, was second-wave feminism, which challenged the definition of women as primarily consumers and custodians of clothing, makeup, and the domestic realm. Johnson offers a similar challenge, but in a sly, ironic manner. (One composition places a halved avocado, in the ‘60s known more as a color than a vegetable, on an avocado-green field.) Her subjects, derived mostly from French fashion magazines and clothing-pattern catalogues, are nearly, well, perfect. But their bodies are sometimes distorted, notably with elongated necks. The tension of fitting into the dominant paradigm has twisted these women and girls in uncomfortable ways.

In this set of artworks, which layer wax and acrylic paint over digital prints, Johnson sometimes brackets women with Barbie-like dolls. Whether flesh-and-blood or plastic, the figures usually appear in lineups, as if on a symbolic catwalk, often with a larger one atop three or four smaller ones below. The arrangements are very tidy, although the clothing -- flowery, billowing, vividly hued, and influenced by Asian and Middle Eastern motifs -- hints at the imminent Age of Aquarius. Johnson’s art couldn’t be more meticulous, but the epoch she revisits is about to get messy.

Sabine Carlson, “Dream a Better World” (McLean Project for the Arts)

STRAIGHTFORWARD IMAGERY IS HEIGHTENED by complex textures or color schemes in the work of the three local artists featured in the McLean Project for the Arts’s “Spring Solo Exhibitions.” Sabine Carlson paints vignettes in which cartoony birds interact with more realistically rendered humans. Zsudayka Nzinga makes fabric-and-paper collages that draw on folklore of the American South. Also a collagist who engages the past, Darlene R. Taylor depicts silhouetted Black women garbed in actual heirloom textiles.

The work of Nzinga and Taylor, who share a gallery, is quite compatible. One difference is that the style of Taylor’s “Heirlooms: Garden Beauty” is more orderly, with compositions that focus on a single woman. Taylor’s colors are also more muted than those of Nzinga, whose “Ancestral Iconography” highlights bright reds and yellows in multi-figure scenes set in what appear to be deep-shadowed forests. The settings seem apt, since Nzinga’s human subjects are overlooked and possibly exploited laborers. Both Taylor and Nzinga summon people from the recesses of history, conjuring them in part with materials that literally embody the past.

The import of Carlson’s “Dream a Better World” appears ecological, although perhaps these small paintings are simply appeals for empathy. The people and birds “appear to be engaged in various kinds of rescue efforts,” says the show’s catalogue. The artist’s blobby birds eye or nudge life-preserver-like objects, which may be symbols of hope. But perhaps the most significant thing about the U-shaped objects is that they’re orange, a color that jauntily contrasts the pictures’s mostly blue and green fields.

Kathryn Camicia: All That Is Wanted Is Time

A Collection of Photographs by Scott Robinson

Leslie Kiefer: Bowl/ing

Through June 13 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

Frame & Frequency X

Through June 14 at Concourse Gallery.

Frame & Frequency: Liquid Territories

Through July 12 at Kaplan Gallery. Both at VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301-315-8200.

Susan R. Johnson: Blueprint for Happiness

Through June 20 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.

MPA Spring Solo Exhibitions: Sabine Carlson, Zsudayka Nzinga, Darlne R. Taylor

Through June 13 at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Ave., McLean. mpaart.org. 703-790-1953.

Joan Miró, “Women and Birds at Sunrise” (Fundació Joan Miró, on loan from a private collection)

BETWEEN 1893 AND 1983, many notable European artists relocated to the United States. One who didn’t is a painter and sculptor who lived for exactly those 90 years, Joan Miró. So the title of “Miró and the United States,” currently at the Phillips Collection, might seem a non sequitur. But the exhibition, which debuted last year at Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró, persuasively argues that the Catalan artist had a profound affinity for the country that failed to draw him into exile.

As Nazi control of France loomed in 1939, the Normandy-based Miró was encouraged to move to the U.S., but instead returned to Spain. Nonetheless, he was ultimately to remark that, “It was really American painting that inspired me.” That quotation, of course, introduces the exhibition, which was organized by Phillips Chief Curator Elsa Smithgall in collaboration with Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, and Dolors Rodriguez Roig of the Fundació Joan Miró.

While Miró’s sojourns in France are well known, less attention has been paid to the artist’s seven visits to the U.S., made between 1947 and 1968. He was represented for decades by Pierre Matisse’s New York gallery, and had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and 1959. He influenced the styles of dozens of American artists, 32 of whom are included here.

The effect of Miró’s bold, colorful, flattened style, which combined elements of Surrealism, Fauvism, and Cubism, can be seen in entries by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, and many others. A Miró-like Arshile Gorky painting from around 1943 hangs next to the 1937 painting that inspired it, “Still Life with an Old Shoe,” which has illusory depth unusual in Miró’s work. The rounded forms of both Miró and Gorky paintings shaped an Isamu Noguchi bronze that’s displayed nearby.

To Miró’s American admirers, perhaps the most significant aspect of his style was the all-over nature of his compositions. Vivid colors and bold shapes announce themselves in such canvases as 1948’s “The Red Sun,” the first Miró bought by Duncan Phillips, the museum’s founder. Yet the picture’s red oblong, while prominent, is not centered, and is in active conversation with other elements, both soft- and hard-edged. As is typical of the artist’s paintings, there’s no single focus, and the imagery extends from edge to edge. Abstract expressionists and color-field painters surely took note.

If most of the Americans featured in the exhibition followed Miró’s lead, a few seem to have developed their styles in sync with his. This selection highlights Alexander Calder, who first met Miró in Paris in 1928. The two became close friends whose links, both personal and artistic, are illustrated by twinned pieces: Calder’s 1930 portrait of Miró, rendered in curved wire that hangs in midair, and the latter’s 1937-60 self-portrait, executed with wiry black brushstrokes on an airy canvas.

Calder made sculptures -- including mobiles -- whose skeletal frameworks and suspended forms echo Miró’s paintings. The angularity of several late-1960s Miró sculptures suggests that the influence also flowed in the other direction, although the Catalan artist also looked to the painted-metal spires of Louise Bourgeois, two of which are in this array. Miró, whose 1920s style verged on the calligraphic, was always drawn to the spindly line.

Ultimately, though, “Miró and the United States” is less about stylistic influence than shared spirit. Many of the Americans who were incited by Miró eventually abandoned his visual trademarks. The mature work of Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and Motherwell -- all represented in this show by earlier pictures -- doesn’t look much like Miró’s. What they share is their transatlantic colleague’s intuitiveness, inventiveness, and sense of fun. In short, freedom. That’s something that -- despite the current climate -- has long been the subject of a fruitful dialogue between Europe and the United States.

Miró and the United States

Through July 5 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. phillipscollection.org. 202-387-2151.

Eric Celarier, “Tubus Trulla” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ERIC CELARIER’S FOUND-OBJECT ASSEMBLAGES are more comic than scary, but they do have menacing aspects. The insectoid sculptures of “Days of Future Past,” repurposed from electric saws and other edged tools, bristle with barbs, pincers, and stingers. Products of what the local artist calls “alternative evolution,” the hybrid critters may not be as threatening as AI, but they warn of a prickly future.

The D.C. Arts Center show, curated by Jerry Truong, offers two sets of Celarier’s work: those sculptures and some black-and-white drawings of organic-mechanical mashups. Both series have been exhibited before, but look fresh here, in part because of the way they fit into the gallery’s distinctive high-ceilinged space. Sculptures hang from the rafters or lurk on the wall, above the visitor’s accustomed range of vision. The massive “Tubus Trulla” dominates the partition behind the mid-room staircase, looming over the entryway like a prophecy.

The show’s title derives from a 1981 storyline in Marvel Comics’s The Uncanny X-Men, later adapted into a movie. The sci-fi provenance is appropriate to Celarier’s themes, as well as to the graphics-novel style of his intricate “Machine” drawings. Although the pictures don’t depict superhero battles, their off-kilter compositions evoke action and airborne vantage points. Wings and tendrils, motors and mirrors -- all spin and swoop in what appears to be zero gravity.

The playfully pseudo-scientific vibe extends to the titles of the sculptures, which translate simple attributes (”big mouth”) into serious-sounding Latin (”magna os”). Such names support the notion that Celarier’s project is a serious undertaking to visualize tomorrowland’s mutant lifeforms so as to “help us choose our path with care,” as the artist’s statement puts it. But these reclaimed-trash beasts are less instructive science than scary-fun science fiction. They revel in impossible possibilities just for the delight of imagining them.

Anastasia Travieso-Diaz, “Silent Sanctum” (Anastasia Travieso-Diaz)

BUILT UP AND THEN PARTLY EXCAVATED, Anastasia Travieso-Diaz’s paintings are literally constructions. So it’s fitting that the local artist’s abstract canvases often suggest grand buildings or naturally occurring structures such as caverns and grottoes. The engrossing pictures in her Studio Russo show, “Disintegration Regeneration,” were made intuitively, and not named initially. But they came to bear such suitably evocative titles as “The Architecture of Collapse” and “Unraveling the Structure.”

Travieso-Diaz paints quickly, mostly using a palette knife rather than a brush. Her intricate compositions often layer black forms over earlier strata applied in a single color or color family. The pigment is not always applied thickly, but is manipulated effectively to simulate depth. The pictures have a sense of foreground and background, with occasional gaps that appear to offer a view into the beyond or beneath.

The spatial qualities of Travieso-Diaz’s paintings are, of course, a matter of personal interpretation. It’s easy to see more than one thing at once: Vertical forms that might be weathered stone columns also look a bit like human spines, and clusters of small repeated gestures hint at petals, leaves, or feathers. The actual texture of the canvas can serve as a visual effect, revealed in areas where most of the paint has been scraped away. Whatever illusory images may result, the artist’s essential subject is the activity of painting itself.

Jim Tetro, “The Wall (Il Muro)” (detail) (The Athenaeum)

JIM TETRO AND MARC SIRINSKY photograph ordinary places in extraordinary ways. The two Northern Virginia artists, who have separate yet complementary shows at the Athenaeum, work in different formats and on different scales. Tetro makes large pictures of small things, while Sirinsky confines views of the great outdoors within matchbook-sized photos.

Tetro is a professional architectural photographer whose “Ex Turbatus” might be seen as a break from his usual work. But the show’s title, Latin for “out of confusion,” indicates that the project was born from something more urgent, which the artist’s statement calls “emotional turmoil.” The closeups of things that are cracked, corroded, peeled, or battered aren’t simply a contrast to Tetro’s regular job of making buildings look good. They express a state of mind.

Composed so tightly that their subjects are often nearly abstract, Tetro’s “confused” pictures are mostly in muted colors, with occasional bright accents. Gold-tinted shots of radiators display the objects’s full form, but the pictures often favor texture and pattern over shape. If these photos are found metaphors, perhaps they represent an obsessive concern with detail that overwhelms the ability to see things for what they are.

While Sirinsky’s show is titled “A Walk in the Woods,” the numbered photos were actually made at a manicured Civil War battlefield near his Leesburg home. Frustrated at work, the artist would stroll there “to contemplate my future,” according to his statement. People don’t appear, but benches and silo-like structures are visible in landscapes that reflect the photographer’s “desperation for peace.”

Mostly sepia-toned black-and-white, the pictures are Fuji Instax mini prints, made with a post-Polaroid instant-photo system. The tiny format gives every location the sense of being faraway. The scenes are peaceful, yet peace itself seems out of reach.

Park Hyewon, “The House of One Peng” (Korean Cultural Center)

TRADITION BOTH COMPLEMENTS AND COMBATS MODERNITY in the work of Kim So Jeong and Park Hyewon, who are showing together in the Korean Cultural Center’s “Connecting Lines.” Park’s interest is the everyday Korean home, depicted realistically in paintings and symbolically in ghostly forms rendered with hanging red thread. Kim makes inked line drawings in a venerable style to portray both historical and contemporary scenes.

Park’s pictures resemble East Asian literati paintings, but she updates that mode -- customarily executed in shades of gray -- with pop-art hues. Seventy precise small drawings of historic buildings are accented with details embroidered in red thread; these scarlet touches include the cross atop Korea’s first church. Park also employs thread to outline house-like shapes in space, a strategy that can be seen to simplify the work of a better-known Korean artist, Suh Do-ho. A single white light is placed inside the diaphanous red structures, so that the thread-defined forms beckon like lanterns.

Kim’s drawings are traditional in form, and sometimes subject. But many of her pictures depict recent political tumult in South Korea, site of a failed coup by its then-president in 2024. Riot cops face demonstrators and nearly two dozen protest flags fly in these mostly black-and-white drawings, which ironically are executed in a carefully controlled style. Intriguingly, some of Kim’s artworks are titled in Spanish, as if to emphasize the global continuity of the events they represent. Park and Kim root their work in South Korea’s past, but acknowledge the eclectic quality of the nation’s current culture.

John Morrell, “Sumac” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AS AN ARTIST, JOHN MORRELL WAS NOT AN INSIDER. Many of the paintings and drawings in his memorial exhibition at Addison/Ripley Fine Art are views from the back, the distance, or the outside. Morrell (1951-2025) was “often drawn to what I cannot see,” according to a remark of his recalled in an appreciation published on the website of the galleries of Georgetown University, where the artist taught for more than five decades.

Thus such strikingly hindered views as “Sumac,” in which most of two houses are hidden behind a fence that itself is partly obscured by some scraggly vegetation and the complex shadows it casts. The scene is far from strange, which is characteristic of Morrell; he frequently depicted commonplace locations, with the focus on simple things in the foreground. Yet there is something mysterious about this approach. The artist found the enigmatic in the everyday.

Made between 1986 and 2017, these realistic pictures demonstrate Morrell’s mastery of neoclassical techniques, whether precise oil painting or drawing on colored paper heightened with white accents. The selection features stately views of Paris, New York, and Oxford, as well as many places near the Georgetown campus. Less typical is “White Water,” a rare gaze at nature in the raw. Morrell preferred the subtle drama of a prosaic vista that appears poetically unreachable.

Eric Celarier: Days of Future Past

Through June 6 at D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. dcartscenter.org. 202- 462-7833.

Anastasia Travieso-Diaz: Disintegration Regeneration

Through June 12 at Studio Russo, 1101 5th St. NW. studiorussollc.dom. 202-430-6988.

Jim Tetro: Ex Turbatus

Marc Sirinsky: Walks in the Woods

Through June 7 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Park Hyewon & Kim So Jeong: Connecting Lines

Through June 5 at the Korean Cultural Center, 2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW. washingtondc.korean-culture.org/en. 202-939-5688.

John Morrell: A Memorial Exhibition

Through June 6 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Jaz Graf, “Father Sky Sutra” (Morton Fine Art)

A BUDDHIST PERCEPTION OF TRANSIENCE is metaphorically woven into Jaz Graf’s handmade-paper abstractions, as seen in Morton Fine Arts’s “Immanent Fray.” Tattered robes once worn by Buddhist bhikkhunis (ordained nuns) are among the raw materials that the Thai-American New Jersey artist molds into rough-textured, multi-ply paper-pulp artworks. These simultaneously embody decay and renewal, with intricate weaving meant to represent the idea of “interbeing” taught by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhat Hanh. “Immanence” refers to the presence of the divine in all things.

While some of Graf’s pieces appear faded and time-worn, others are neon-bright, with day-glo pigments and flecks of gold leaf. (Gold symbolizes enlightenment in Buddhism.) The most common motif in the show’s works is a set of horizontal bars, stacked inexactly in near-parallel so they appear to be slipping or falling. (The titles of these pieces indicate that they’re sutras, or scriptures.) Although literally fixed in place, the bars appear tentatively placed, as if to represent the inevitability of change.

That there’s something specifically Asian about Graf’s style is underscored by the similarity of her fabrications to those of Japan’s Hiromitsu Kuroo, another purveyor of patterned fabric-and-paper abstractions represented by Morton Fine Art. Both artists create and then partly erase, but where Kuroo bleaches, Graf burns. The process opens small holes through which lower levels become visible, beckoning the eye into mostly hidden realms. Graf makes immanence visual, and if the glimpses she offers are ragged and fragmentary, the realistic seeker could hardly expect more.

Yumiko Hirokawa, “The Potomac” (Watergate Gallery)

STYLISTICALLY, YUMIKO HIROKAWA’S precise, luminous pencil drawing of the Potomac is not typical of the work in “Silent Resistance,” the versatile Japanese artist’s Watergate Gallery show. But the picture does share one significant attribute with most of the other pieces: It plunges the viewer into a scene that’s all-over and essentially borderless. The image has literal edges, yet appears potentially infinite.

Many of the paintings in this array depict cascades of white flowers on silver-leafed backgrounds, although others employ a similar format in which the repeated forms are pink blobs that evoke the knit hats of the anti-Trump 2017 Women’s March, while also hinting at cherry blossoms. Although Hirokawa doesn’t portray violence, her calling is “painting against war,” says her statement.

This interest is both universal and personal. Then a Corcoran student, Hirokawa was living in Washington on 9/11; a half century earlier, her father witnessed the Nagasaki A-bombing from a distance. Two “Canna” paintings portray a flower that survived the nuclear assault on Hiroshima, and the rendering of a crocodile that lives in a bomb crater invokes another American war. Sometimes violence and enduring nature are juxtaposed directly, as when the artist floats a blue dragonfly near two circling helicopters, also blue, inspired by the ones she saw in the sky over Arlington after 9/11.

Most of the show’s entries are flat and impressionistic on gleaming silver- or gold-leaf backgrounds. But the crisp realism of the artist’s drawing of the Potomac is seen in a few other pictures. Oil and tempera paintings of a Shirley Temple doll and a rabbit nestled in foliage demonstrate that Hirokawa has mastered traditional Western representational art. Yet that serves just as the foundation for art that’s visually immersive and thematically sweeping.

WHILE LIVING IN D.C., HIROKAWA was a member of the E Street Artists, an informal group of students of local light-and-color painter Mira Hecht. These artists have shown together at Watergate Gallery, and that venue’s proprietor, Dale Johnson, has curated a survey of their work at ADA Gallery. Hirokawa is included in the exhibition, “Finding Joy,” alongside such notable artists as Cheryl Ann Bearss, Sabiha Iqbal, and Lois Kampinsky.

Much of the imagery is flowery, although that quality can be as abstract as in Hirokawa’s depiction of cherry blossoms as pink and white sideways ovals on a silver field. Bright orange and red accents set off more realistic landscapes in Sabrina Pedreira’s picture of silhouetted palms at dawn and Nimi Trehan’s views of a rocky or icy expanse.

Abstract gestures in bright hues characterize Noreene Janus’s “Reflections,” but they’re rendered in an angular style that recalls Futurism. The pinks of Paul G. Cunningham’s painting on a rolling 3D canvas may suggest a garden, but the piece’s title is “Cotton Candy.” That gossamer confection is an apt choice for a show that draws so much inspiration from fragile, ephemeral blooms.

Deborah Schindler, “Last Tree in the Amazon” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

PRECISE PATTERNING AND PLAYFUL JUXTAPOSITION MEET a disorderly world in Deborah Schindler’s black-and-white linoleum cuts. Four squirrels, neatly linked by their tails, fuse to resemble a pinwheel in “Oh, What Tangled Tails We Weave.” Two animals, prey and predator, impersonate each other in “Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing, Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” The bovines of “Free Range Cattle” gambol tidily in a field that surrounds a building stacked with human prisoners. Above a man-maimed environment, a quartet of “Homing Pigeons” hover above four highway cloverleafs.

“Land, Sea, and Air,” the local artist’s Washington Printmakers Gallery exhibition, is not all sleek lines and gentle whimsies. The show’s most striking piece, “Last Tree in the Amazon,” distills ecological disaster by depicting a single tree as the only refuge for dozens of birds, monkeys, lizards, and other creatures. Schindler, whose work as a Portuguese interpreter links her to Brazil, uses her meticulous style to foretell a potentially chaotic future.

This selection does include some etchings and lithographs, several of them enhanced by discreet color tints. Most of the prints are linocuts, crisply executed, elegantly composed, and visually witty as is usual in Schindler’s work. Seemingly inherent in the artist’s methodical technique is a sense of everything in its proper place -- like the 25 creatures, diverse yet identically boxed, of “Animal Game.” Yet some of these pictures do present, whether with a wink or a cry of alarm, the possibility of disruption.

Jahru, “Succulent (Shamierah)” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ASIAN-AMERICAN CULTURE IS ANYTHING but a melting pot in “Borderless,” a five-artist exhibition mounted at Brentwood Arts Exchange for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Curated by Akemi Maegawa, the diverse show includes such widely exhibited artists as Mei Mei Chang, Jun Lee, and Julia Chon.

Two of the artists are known, at least in part, as muralists, and have polished styles that recall graphic novels and commercial illustration. Chon’s pair of family portraits use clothing to chart a cultural gap: One group is in Western dress, and the other in Korean. JAHRU (aka Jeff Huntington) is a Filipino-American painter whose deft portraits, often on shaped canvases, depict Black as well as Asian subjects. Their faces are overlaid with patterns, whether geometric or botanical.

Lee is showing some familiar woodcuts of animals, rendered with humor and exquisite detail, as well as 3D animal masks made from repurposed prints of flowers. Also three-dimensional are Tang’s enigmatic wooden wall piece and Chan’s installation: pictures, machine-like objects (many made from cardboard), and a large mirror. Perhaps the intent is that art should reflect its observer’s identity as well as its maker’s.

Installation view of Julia Wachtel’s “and” (Von Ammon Co.)

THE CRYPTIC TITLE OF JULIA WACHTEL’S Von Ammon Co. show, “and,” may refer to the deadpan way the exhibition’s two panoramic paintings link disparate things. One artwork doubles groups of U.S. Civil War reenactors, one set upside-down, on each side of an emoji of a goofily chagrined yellow face. The second parks a Tesla cybertruck, seen in a Monument Valley-like location typical of automobile advertising, with a cartoonish rendering of Jesus, lugging the cross on which he is to be crucified. The contrasting tones are, and are meant to be, jarring.

All these pictures are, of course, borrowed. They’re derived from published photographs, with halftone dots visible, or from drawings, probably computer-generated. Like 1960s pop artists, Wachtel appropriates mass-media images to represent a world where every product and all ideas are reduced -- or elevated -- to marketing ploys. Does Wachtel employ this strategy in an age when things have gotten worse, or just more brazen?

Although “and” is billed as a two-painting show, it also contains five smaller pictures that are more visually interesting than the featured artworks. Also photo-derived, but without ironic juxtapositions, these oils depict the meteorological threats of high winds and funnel clouds. Rendered mostly in gray, but with touches of color, the paintings blow away thoughts of mass-culture inanities. The prospect of being killed by a tornado concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Kathrin Swoboda, “Between Field and Meadow” (Photoworks)

A NEW MORNING DAWNS, OR SO IT APPEARS, in many of the pictures in Photoworks’s “Awakening.” The majority of the 21 contributors’s photos, juried by Sarah Hood Salomon, are nature views, and many of them are lovely, deftly composed closeups. Susan Brown ponders a tuft of leaves dotted with water, and David Frey observes a similar moment in black-and-white. Three photographers divulge intimate views of plants, Ed Palaszynski in black-and-white and Richard Weiblinger and Julie Miller in vivid color. Kathrin Swoboda uses narrow depth of field to highlight a cardinal, crisp and crimson, in a field of hazy green. The resulting image is simultaneously exact and impressionistic.

There’s a single urban scene -- Manhattan, of course, as seen by Felix Alvarado -- and only two pictures that depict humans. In this flowery context, Meredith Massey’s “Sink” is an unexpected standout. Like most of the show’s participants, the photographer arrests flickers of sunlight, but that illumination plays on white porcelain rather than glistening fronds. While Massey’s subject may not be as inherently beautiful as Miller’s pincushion flower, the frozen instant is just as alluring.

Jaz Graf: Immanent Fray

Through May 30 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. 202-628-2787. Open by appointment.

Yumiko Hirokawa: Silent Resistance

Through May 30 at Watergate Gallery, 2552 Virginia Ave. NW. watergategalleryframedesign.com. 202-338-4488.

E Street Artists: Finding Joy

Through July 16 at ADA Art Gallery, 1627 21st St. NW. adawdc.org/en/page/13/culture. 202-621-6633.

Deborah Schindler: Land, Sea, and Air

Through May 31 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Borderless

Through May 30 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com/facilities/brentwood-arts-exchange. 301-277-2863.

Julia Wachtel: and

Through May 31 at Von Ammon Co, 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

Awakening

Through May 31 at Photoworks, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo. glenechophotoworks.org. 301-634-2274.

Nicholas Wisniewski, “Tree of Heaven: Harford Road & Central Ave” (detail) (Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington)

A LOT HAS HAPPENED TO CITIES since the 17th century, when urban scenes first became a popular genre of painting. The grandeur captured centuries ago by Vermeer and Canaletto may still exist in Europe, but American cities are a messier subject. Especially Baltimore, the long-neglected city excavated by artist-builder Nicholas Wisniewski. He’s one of the three contributors to “Within Reach: Artists and the Built Environment,” a Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington exhibition.

Playing with scale and material, Wisniewski builds house models from construction materials and incises renderings of houses into sheets of battered drywall. The latter process began with what the artist’s statement calls “an obviously futile act of repair”: He would take a section of drywall from an abandoned house, etch a picture of the structure’s facade into the slab, and then return it to the building.

The most interesting thing about this gesture is its bid to maintain continuity. Visual art has long been aligned with modernist architecture. Indeed, it could be argued the art museum is contemporary architecture’s essential product. But Wisniewski wants no part of obliterating his city’s architectural legacy and replacing it with flashy monumentality. His goals are as modest as his materials. If Baltimore can’t thrive as a city, at least it can endure as a DIY art project.

Curated by Blair Murphy, the show also features Gerardo Camargo, another artist who knows his way around construction sites, and Megan Mueller, who photographs streets and sidewalks of her native Los Angeles and digitally stitches them together to make semi-abstracted murals. To bring these flattened cityscapes into the third dimension, the artist sometimes mounts them so that they slip partly off the wall and onto the floor. Mueller reduces her hometown to found patterns, but gives these motifs a sense of place.

A Mexico-born local artist, Camargo employs found materials to craft geometric designs, yet emphasizes evidence of hand labor. If his work at MOCA contrasts architectural forms with materiality, his concurrent show at Stone Tower Gallery is keyed more to the latter. At the center of “On Behalf of New Myths,” which was curated by Fabiola R. Delgado, is a sort of ramshackle shrine made of used drop cloths and filled with construction tools.

These well-used objects can be seen as offerings to some deity, and the god in question might be the snake whose sinuous contours unify one of the show’s two banners. Made of used sandpaper, tape, and drywall dust, these hanging artworks depict the anonymous, and partial, faces of construction workers. That these laborers are mostly Mesoamerican is underscored by the presence of the sacred serpent. While the workers engage in gritty and mundane toil, their folklore tells of a mythical plane of existence.

Installation view of “Throughlines” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THERE’S AN ARCHITECTURAL QUALITY to the drawings and paintings of Jason Karolak, one of the two artists showing in PFA Gallery’s “Throughlines.” The broken lines of some of the Brooklyn artist’s minimalist drawings, made with pencil that’s partially overlaid with ink, suggest floor plans for imaginary buildings. That may be intentional, since Karolak’s interests include “utopian architecture and communal societies,” according to PFA’s biographical note.

The three Karolak paintings in this selection are as dense and dark as the drawings are open and mostly white. The pictures are loosely painted, yet from a distance their shapes appear precise. Atop the multi-layered compositions are pseudo-diagrammatic lines similar to those in the drawings, rendered in lighter colors. They suggest unreadable neon signs blazing on darkened streets, or portals into the darkness. The effect may not conjure utopia, but the sketchy forms do seem archetypal.

The show’s other contributor is Ara Koh, a Seoul-born local ceramicist. Her stoneware pieces are rough rectangles made of tangled tendrils, always in glistening shades of a single color. The serpentine curls appear organic, yet are pressed into near-geometric forms that indicate human intervention. The artist’s titles, which include “Gnarly Magic” and “Blue Glazed,” tend to refer only to the sculptures’s visual aspects. Yet the coiling energy of Koh’s style has metaphysical implications: The surging clay filaments seem to embody an unyielding life force.

Janathel Shaw, “Chaos Reigns” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

LOCAL COLOR IS NOT THE ONLY HUE in “Ain’t No Home: History and Legacy in the Black Community.” This Touchstone Gallery exhibition, keyed to the venue’s 50th anniversary, presents work by eight local artists, including Sheldon Scott, Jermaine “jET” Carter, and Touchstone regular Janathel Shaw. Many of the pieces are familiar from previous solo shows.

Among the items that employ local landmarks are Carter’s photograph of the Howard Theater, printed on honeycomb-patterned wood, and Blu Murphy’s drawing-collages of children in front of such iconic backdrops as a Metrorail map or monumental Washington. The young people are fixed in place by the recognizable locations, but offered the possibility of a freer future.

The past is even more palpable in Neville Barbour’s “Leaving,” which places two of the artist’s exquisitely detailed photo-derived drawings inside a battered suitcase. Sheldon Scott embodies legend in his “Self Portrait as John Henry,” which distills the “steel-driving man” to a black-and-white photograph of a hand that holds a sledgehammer. Equally totemic is Paula Mans’s sculptural painting of a cotton plant that emerges from a Black person’s mouth.

Not unexpectedly, the most complex entry is by Shaw. Her “Chaos Reigns” is a history of protest and reaction etched on the four sides of a bell- or beaker-shaped sculpture. The imagery is raw and the rendering stark, but the apparent moral is the necessity of resilience. Perhaps Shaw’s ceramic bell is a chime of freedom.

Lizzie Butler, “Scent of the Storm II” (Amy Kaslow Gallery)

THERE’S A LOT OF SKY in the paintings of Lizzie Butler and Jaroslav Leonets, the two landscape artists paired in Amy Kaslow Gallery’s “Lovely Day.” But where Butler’s pictures are fluid and ethereal, Leonets’s are chunky and earthy. Perhaps it’s significant that Butler’s firmaments often soar over vast expanses of water, which echo the colors and textures of what’s above. But several of the Londoner’s scenes center on green-and-brown patchwork fields, and rivers often course through Leonets’s views of his native Ukraine during the tranquil years just before the Russian invasion.

Part of the contrast is simply technique. Butler’s style is gauzier and more layered, with soft edges and multi-tiered hues. Light appears to emanate from unseen sources, or to reveal itself primarily in the form of reflections. Sunlight also gambols on liquid surfaces in such Leonets canvases as “Fast Water,” but his forms are harder-edged and firmer. That’s true even when the subjects are clouds, which appear to be made of something much more substantial than water vapor.

Perhaps the essential difference is that Butler pursues transcendence while Leonets seeks preservation. The Briton’s often gray-tinged pictures flirt with abstraction, and focus on areas where the border between water and sky is indistinct. The Ukrainian’s are far from photorealistic, but offer a sense of real places and a specific era. While Butler seeks to let go, Leonets insists on holding on.

Kelly Posey, “Nat. Geo: Psychedelic Zooplankton” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AMONG THE INSPIRATIONS FOR KELLY POSEY’S Arts Club of Washington show is a period the Maryland artist spent in China as a teacher of high-school art and English. She arrived with a cache of old issues of National Geographic, which she encouraged her students to cut up for collages. For “Nat Geo Series: Re-imagining Our World,” Posey did the same. Her Arts Club of Washington show features crowded and colorful collage-paintings, coated with encaustic and sometimes including low-relief sculptural touches.

All but two of Posey’s mixed-media pictures are round, and the circular shape suggests a gaze through a telescope or microscope. The metaphorical use of the latter device is evoked not only by the teeming compositions but also by such titles as “Nat. Geo: Psychedelic Zooplankton.” The legible phenomena aren’t necessarily minuscule, but the visual elements bob and flow, as if in some sort of fluid medium.

The actual liquid materials, of course, are varieties of paint, including oil and watercolor. These both underpin and overlay the collaged bits, cohering the randomly juxtaposed found images. Given that Posey’s stated intent is to invite viewers “to reconsider established understandings of our planet,” her technique is as urgent as it is inventive.

Within Reach: Artists and the Built Environment

Through May 24 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. 703-248-6800.

Gerardo Camargo: On Behalf of New Myths

Through May 31 at Stone Tower Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Jason Karolak & Ara Koh: Throughlines

Through June 6 at PFA Gallery, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

Ain’t No Place: History and Legacy in the Black Community

Through May 25 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

Lovely Day

Through May 31 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Kelly Posey: Nat Geo Series: Re-imagining Our World

Through May 30 at the Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St. NW. artsclubofwashington.org. 202-331-7282.

Kanchan Balsé, “Outgrowth” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

PRESENTING A FOUND OBJECT AS ART was initially a Dada-inspired jibe at bourgeois reverence for high-culture objects. But the practice has come to have significance for environmentalists as well. Not all of the 15 participants in “Finders Keepers: Making Meaning with the Materials Around Us” offer a specifically ecological message. Yet the importance of repurposing materials in a world awash in disposable products does underscore the 30-artwork I Street Gallery show.

Thus Veronica Szalus, who has long given second lives to one-use items, erects a pair of teepee-like structures whose bamboo armatures are wrapped in loops of discarded plastic film. Even if the humble edifices endure just long enough for this exhibition, the plastic strips will have served a purpose far longer than originally intended.

Equally humble in origin is “Outgrowth,” an elegant wall piece by Kanchan Balsé, who curated the show with Ira Tattleman. Balsé splayed a mop so that its heavily shadowed form resembles something organic -- a butterfly, perhaps, or a set of human lungs. Curiously, Tattleman also transforms cleaning devices: His sculpture affixes a rake, brushes, and a vacuum attachment to a wooden framework that climbs the wall like a ladder.

Tattelman’s other piece, “Sitting Stick,” is the show’s closest thing to a Duchampian readymade. But it’s two simple and related things, wittily combined: a worn bicycle seat atop a walking stick, a useful appliance for people who don’t know if they’re staying or going.

There seems to be a backstory, personal and untold, to Sondra N. Arkin’s “Refinancing,” a set of paper tubes made of paper from shredded financial documents. As the pipes dance across the wall, they suggest a melodic rhythm that complements the fanciful wood-and-wire sculptures of Layne Garrett, whose constructions play at being musical instruments.

Also evocative of music are Gayle Friedman’s wall sculptures, which are made mostly of looping bandsaw blades whose metallic sheen is alchemized into flower-like hues with leftover house paint. Metal takes a more literally natural shape in Niki Asfar’s assemblage, which outlines a mountain range by arranging shards of a mirror. One of Gloria Vasquez’s contributions is a clump, somewhat heart-shaped, of dried red flowers preserved unnaturally in clear resin.

The show’s most literal nature image is a video of a grassy field sequestered behind a metal-link fence in a mixed-media piece by Chris Combs, who often places up-to-date digital art inside battered old containers. There’s also a video element to Combs’s other piece, but it’s hidden inside a scourged metal box and activated by inserting a quarter. The artist not only makes interactive devices; he also pays tribute to the interactive machines of a simpler era.

The odd person out is Luis Del Valle, who paints realistic portraits, often of blue-collar workers. What makes him a finder is his choice of canvas: He typically renders his pictures on international-orange road signs, connecting his subjects to gritty work sites. In an age of machine-made, mass-produced, and near-valueless products, Del Valle celebrates labor and individuality.

Sandy Walker, “Day/Night” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THERE’S NOT A TRACE OF GREEN in “Out of Green Mansions: The Woodblock Prints of Sandy Walker,” a selection of exuberant black-and-white artworks. Line alone represents nature’s abundance in these large pictures on display at the American University Museum (and curated by its director, Jack Rasmussen). The Oakland-based Walker is a D.C. native who has lived in many places in North America, some of them rustic. The latter locales seem to have shaped these pictures, which are simultaneously minimalist and lush. Most of the prints sprawl across multiple pieces of paper, as if their subjects are too sweeping to be contained on a single sheet.

Made between 1987 and 2022, the pictures have a painterly quality, even though they were painstakingly carved rather than spontaneously brushed. (The most recent artworks were incised for the 83-year-old Walker by an associate, Ryan Harrison.) The abstracted nature scenes are often dense; the black-heavy “Green Mansions” conjures the sense of being deep inside the deepest of woods. But others are airy, and even verge on the skeletal. The jaggedly horizontal forms in the first half of “Day/Night,” which are roughly mirrored in reverse in the second part, starkly suggest bones or tendons as well as roots or branches.

“Day/Night” is also the most calligraphic of these pictures, whose swooping forms recall stylized East Asian writing -- another form of brushwork. Paper itself, whose complex textures are evident in the sometimes vast areas of white space, is also integral. Walker’s works retain the attractions of prints while pushing toward something looser and, fittingly, wilder.

linn meyers, untitled (Spagnuolo Gallery)

SINCE NEITHER ARTIST DEPICTS REAL-WORLD PHENOMENON, perhaps it’s inaccurate to say that Kendall Buster portrays things and linn meyers illustrates places. But the work of the two artists, paired in “Speculative Morphologies” at Georgetown University’s Spagnuolo Gallery, does divide roughly that way. Admittedly, there’s an architectonic quality to many of Buster’s drawings and sculptures. But the Richmond-based artist’s “specimens,” as she terms them, are discrete and self-contained, while meyers’s drawings sprawl, interlock, and spiral as if toward infinity.

Buster has a background in microbiology, which may explain the seemingly organic forms of many of her graphite-on-mylar renderings. Richly textured and deftly modeled to simulate three dimensions, the pictures suggest new varieties of vegetables. Yet the monochromatic drawings are from a series of “biological models for a new architecture,” and some resemble buildings more than plants. These complement the show’s paper-and-foamboard sculptures, whose shapes are geometric rather than organic. Stacked neatly on three shelves, the white forms appear ready to be assembled into an urbanistic whole like “Model City (Constraint),” which was exhibited two years ago at the Kreeger Museum.

There are grids and circles in meyers’s exquisitely intricate drawings and prints, but they’re drawn freehand so the lines gently slip and slide. That’s usually evident only on close inspection, which reveals subtle deviations in pictures that appear systematic from a distance. The artist, a part-time Washingtonian, sometimes superimposes such elementary shapes as circles or diamonds over tight grids or fingerprint-like whorls. The myriad lines appear to spin or bend, seemingly refracted by a prism or a looming star. If Buster’s creations appear anchored to the earth, meyers’s can seem interstellar.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Kreeger Museum and was curated by Georgetown University Curatorial Studies graduate students Abigail Dunnigan, Miranda Glasgow, Jessica Harris, Mia Johnson, Alexandra Morse, Qaman Omar, Anne Satre, Lily Schwegler, Reina Shin, and Mason Stempel, guided by Professor Jaynelle Hazard.

Maureen Minehan, “Toppled” (Multiple Exposures Gallery

THE CURRENT SHOW AT MULTIPLE EXPOSURES GALLERY -- the first in its new first-floor space -- is one of its least cohesive. But perhaps that should be expected of an exhibition whose title, and theme, is “Unsettled.” The photographs selected by juror Susan Ruddick Bloom are intriguing, but aren’t hung on any apparent through-line.

A sense of loneliness characterizes Stacy Smith Evans’s study of an agricultural canal in rural California, as well as Eric Johnson and David Meyer’s pictures of, respectively, abandoned structures and building materials scattered in the grass. But people engage with each other in Van Pulley and Fred Zafran’s photos -- some of the show’s most colorful -- of front-stoop conversation or diner patrons.

Hints at narrative energize Russell Barajas’s trio of medically themed vignettes, Soomin Ham’s photo of a runner who might be chased by a distant figure, and Irina Lawton’s pair of surreal pictures of a woman who strikes a gravity-defying pose. Nature shows various degrees of power in Sarah Hood Salomon’s image of a flooded picnic table and Tom Sliter’s photos of ice floes highlighted by vivid blue accents. Tiny yet potent bits of color draw the eye into Guillermo Olaizola’s picture of a person in near darkness, apparently on a grand staircase, and Maureen Minehan’s shot of an orange traffic cone toppled into a small light-blue puddle amid a grassy green-black expanse. That cone is literally unsettled, yet in the instant frozen in this picture, every element appears in immaculate balance.

Finders Keepers: Making Meaning with the Materials Around Us

Through May 22 at I Street Gallery, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, 200 I St. SE. founddc.net/finders

Out of Green Mansions: The Woodblock Prints of Sandy Walker

Through May 17 at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum

Kendall Buster and linn meyers: Speculative Morphologies

On view through May 17 at Spagnuolo Gallery, Georgetown University, 1221 36th St NW; 202-687-9206; art.georgetown.edu/galleries

Unsettled

Through May 17 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

David Hammons, “African-American Flag” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AS THE UNITED STATES PREPARES TO CELEBRATE 250 years of freedom for some of its inhabitants, the David C. Driskell Center surveys the Black American response to the country’s star-spangled iconography. “America Will Be!” includes works by nearly two dozen artists, many of them well-known. Most of the entries are recent, but the selection stretches as far back as Gordon Parks’s 1942 “American Gothic, Washington D.C.,” the bitterly ironic photograph in which a Black cleaning woman stands in front of an American flag. More than 60 years later, photographer William Anderson found another symbol of broken promises in the same flag, now in front of a Katrina-ravaged house.

Not all the pieces include or deconstruct the U.S. flag. Wilmer Wilson IV photographed himself covered in “I voted” stickers as a homage to Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved man who mailed himself from Virginia to freedom in 1849. Faith Ringgold’s series of silkscreen prints illustrate the Declaration of Independence, with some pertinent asides by Sojourner Truth and Abigail Adams about people the founders overlooked.

Several contributors use flags, banners, or streamers to commemorate victims of American-as-apple-pie violence. In Michael C. Gibson’s upside-down flag, the mixed-media red stripes appear to drip like blood. Mostly black stripes characterize June Edmonds’s hanging monument to the Black troops remembered in the film Glory. Hank Willis Thomas suspends blue banners with a white star embroidered for each of the people -- 14,719, shockingly -- killed by guns in 2018.

Thickly impastoed paintings, also by Edmonds, take a banner-like template and derive their colors from the skin tones of people of African descent, including her Barbadian grandparents. Mark Thomas Gibson sticks with red, white, and blue, but transforms the stripes into wave-like swells. Sanford Biggers constructs a two-faced textile piece on a 3D matrix to display with the stars-and-stripes on one side and a traditional quilt on the other. Sonya Clark offers a replica of the dish towel waved as a flag of surrender by Confederate troops in 1865.

David Hammons and Ato Ribeiro redefine the U.S. standard by incorporating African motifs. Ribeiro’s flag-like construction of repurposed wood employs a pattern reminiscent of Ghanian kente cloth. Hammons retains the design of the U.S. flag but employs the red, black, and green of the Pan-African flag created by Marcus Garvey and his followers.

June Clark’s response to the American flag is simple but perhaps the most powerful. The New York-born artist, long resident in Toronto, reduces the flag to a pile of red, white, and blue scraps, heaped on the floor with a few 3D stars. Piecing it back together would be a major undertaking. And, when viewed from a haven outside the country, perhaps not worth the bother.

Mark Kelner, “52 Stars” (Hemphill Artworks)

FLAGS ALSO FEATURE IN MARK KELNER’S “American Mosaic,” although the artist’s perspective on the red, white, and blue is particularly attuned to red. Born in the U.S. to Russian parents, Kelner often explores the kinship between political propaganda and commercial marketing. The 12 pieces in the local artist’s Hemphill Artworks online exhibition include a set of “Eight American Reds,” paint swatches that represent shades of consumer packaging -- including “MAGA” -- and the promotional slogans of five U.S. states as translated into Russian.

Among Kelner’s elegantly designed and rendered artworks are several versions of the American flag, notably one made from the red, white, or blue spines of hardback books. More pointed is “52 States,” in which potential statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico causes the star-spangled blue field to expand dramatically, nearly crowding out the stripes that commemorate the original 13 colonies. Other flag-like pieces take the shape of a Zippo lighter -- once an American icon -- or turn the bold colors into black-and-white bar codes like the ones now found on nearly all products.

The latter painting is titled “Flag (After Jasper Johns),” in recognition of the pop artist who painted so many U.S. flags. It’s natural to think of Johns when looking at Kelner’s work, but the two artists are more unlike than similar. Where Johns’s flags were rendered with intentional roughness, Kelner’s style is as crisp and clean as computer-generated imagery.

Also, while Johns and his cohorts viewed American culture ironically, Kelner makes such politically (and personally) charged sculptures as “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” a Star of David constructed of tiki torches like ones carried by the right-wing demonstrators who chanted that phrase in Charlottesville in 2017. Some of Kelner’s creations are detached observations, but others are active statements of resistance.

Charles Ritchie, “Midday Rain” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)

ALL THE WORKS IN “CARTE BLANCHE,” a diverse 10-artist show at Gallery Neptune & Brown, are on paper. But some of the most striking ones are of paper as well. Caleb Nussear uses diamond-shaped folds to add topographic interest to vivid multi-color fields rendered with colored pencil and pastel. Alexandra Chiou cuts hand-painted sheets of paper into feathery, nature-inspired shapes and assembles the pieces into spiraling organisms that certify such titles as “Emerge” and “Renewal.” Both artists deftly use simple materials to evoke complex phenomena.

Among the other abstractionists are Erick Johnson, who places subtly striated, watery hued geometric shapes into cobblestone-like arrays; and Nick Lamia, whose freehand ink drawings contrast map-like sections with open -- or perhaps just uncharted -- spaces. Ben Tolman’s crypto-architectural drawing playfully piles a baroque array of objects and abstract forms at the front of a space whose wall and ceiling are patterned with regular black squares. Typical of the elegance of linn meyers’s style is her drawing of a large circle defined by tightly hand-drawn black lines on a dark gray field.

The selection includes work by three photographers, including Michael Dax Iaccone, who uses his camera to document panoramas of his land-art endeavors. Redeat Wondemu, who’s known for portraits, offers a sextet of pastoral views and floral closeups, all made at Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens. Most atmospheric are two pictures from Soomin Ham’s “Windows” series, whose evocation of the past is both metaphorical and literal: At the bottom of the multi-level montages are photos made by the artist’s grandfather.

Not a photographer, but sometimes a photorealist, is Charles Ritchie, who contributes four drawing-paintings. These range from the mistily monochromatic “Midday Rain,” made with pencil and watercolor, to the colorful but muted “Kitchen II,” precisely rendered with pencil, ink, watercolor, and acrylic. Ritchie depicts domestic scenes with an attentiveness that transforms everyday into exceptional.

Carolee Jakes, “Waterfall” (Studio Gallery)

BLOSSOMS APPEAR TO EMERGE FROM BLACKNESS in the eight large Carolee Jakes paintings at Studio Gallery. In fact, they’re emanating partly from older pictures, as is specified by the show’s title, “Pentimenti: New Work on Old Canvases.” The near-abstract paintings take much of their power from what Jakes calls “the complex, deep dark in Old Master paintings,” which accentuates the luminous highlights. The lush backgrounds are mostly black and dark brown, but there’s enough blue that the compositions suggest underwater scenes as often as they do shadowy, candle-lighted 16th-century interiors.

The details often resemble flowers, as Jakes acknowledges but says was not her original intent. Intriguingly, the artist most often paints precisely, producing imagery that has an art nouveau feel in such pictures as “Mosaic.” Yet some areas are much looser and seemingly more intuitive. All these elements -- including the partly painted-over pentimenti -- harmonize splendidly. The deep darkness splits open, as if pierced by unexpected, uncontainable light.

Near “Pentimenti” are three collaborative drawing-paintings by Jakes, Chris Chernow, and Elizabeth Curren. As airy as Jakes’s paintings are dense, the pictures juxtapose interlocking patterns, hard-edged and curling forms, and primarily pastel hues. Most of the imagery is abstract yet evocative of nature, although two include a pencil drawing of a partial person. The most effective of the trio is “Reaching,” in which whorl-filled triangles partly block oceans of seaweed-like green tendrils. One triangle leads to a ghostly hand, a reminder that these intricate patterns were made rather than found.

Don Kimes, “It Was a House” (Ashe & Norton)

LIKE JAKES, DON KIMES BUILDS ATOP EARLIER IMAGES, the results of a 2003 flood that destroyed his previous work. Traces of this deluge can be seen in multi-layered paintings by the artist, who divides his time between D.C., New York, and Italy. His abstract imagery often suggests stone, minerals, and gems as well as more fluid substances. The 15 small mixed-media pictures on paper in the window at Ashe & Norton’s storefront gallery feature earthy hues and forms that appear to be veined, cracked, or weathered.

The show is titled either “Thoughts from Umbria” or “Thoughts on Umbria”; the press release says the former, while a handout says the latter. Whatever the correct preposition, Kimes’s thoughts have recently strayed far from northern Italy. Individual titles invoke Darfur, Gaza, and Mariupol, and “It was a House” could depict desolation under a black sun.

That’s merely a possibility. These paintings, made with ink, acrylic, and gouache, can be read purely as complex exercises in color and texture. They’re entirely satisfying as such. But the allusions to recent conflicts adds a provocative thematic level to work that also offers multiple visual strata.

America Will Be!

Through May 8 at the David C. Driskell Center, 1214 Cole Student Activities Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park. driskellcenter.umd.edu. 301-314-2615.

Mark Kelner: American Mosaic

Through May 9 at Hemphill Artworks online. hemphillfinearts.com. 202-234-5601.

Carte Blanche: Works on Paper

Through May 9 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.

Carolee Jakes: Pentimenti: New Work on Old Canvases

Chris Chernow, Elizabeth Curren, Carolee Jakes: Collaboration

Through May 16 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.

Don Kimes: Thoughts from Umbria

Through May 10 at Ashe & Norton, 2440 Wisconsin Ave. NW, #A. ashe.norton@gmail.com.

peter campus, installation of “the phillips quartets” (Phillips Collection)

THE CHRONOLOGICAL GAP IN PETER CAMPUS’S Phillips Collection show at first seems overwhelming, even insurmountable. The veteran New York video artist’s “there somewhere” consists of five pieces, one made in 1978 and the rest in 2023-24. The first plays in a separate gallery from the rest, as if to emphasize how much the 89-year-old artist’s approach has changed. The earlier video is stark, square, and in contrasty black-and-white; the others are horizontal and lushly full-color.

“Head of a Man with Death on His Mind” is a 12-minute study of a tightly cropped face, which barely moves. The other pieces, which the now-capitalization-averse campus calls “the phillips quartets,” are six-to-17-minute views of shallow water along the coastline near the artist’s Long Island home. The newer videos are found landscape paintings in which natural phenomena verge on abstraction, and thus are indeed in the tradition of the Phillips. But both the watery images and campus’s claim that the ocean “is in us” seem a little obvious.

Clearly, campus has mellowed since his reputation-making 1970s work. Yet some aspects of his style, at least as seen here, haven’t changed. None of these videos was shaped by editing, montage, or camera movement; the images capture motion, but don’t initiate it. If switching from a man’s face to tidal pools doesn’t much alter campus’s technique, it does affect the viewer’s expectations. When interacting with another person, even just visually, people anticipate some spark of communion, however small or delayed. Gazing at water is another matter entirely. Campus’s ideas of the ocean may be grandiose, but his images of it are lullingly prosaic.

Nilou Kazemzadeh, “Take Care” (detail) (Hamiltonian Artworks)

NILOU KAZEMZADEH’S WORK IS FIRMLY ROOTED, but observers may not immediately realize where. The multi-media artist is of Iranian descent, and that country’s fig and pistachio trees are talismans in the video, collages, and ceramics of Kazemzadeh’s Hamiltonian Artists exhibition, “I Witnessed the Garden Bear Fruit.” But the artist grew up in Potomac, Md., and that D.C. suburb also has a palpable presence in the show: The clay used to make traditional Persian-style vessels was obtained from stream banks near Kazemzadeh’s Maryland home.

Disembodied hands represent human existence, and human labor, in the artist’s photographs, as well as a video in which two sets of hands shell and position nuts. There is another sort of human presence, but it’s more ghostly: Vintage black-and-white photos of family members are positioned on fields of dried mud within wooden frames. A few of these pictures are as legible as the artist’s images of hands, but others are faded nearly into oblivion. Trees remain, as the title of one piece notes, but people become spectral.

In this show, wild clay serves as a backdrop or is scattered on the floor as part of an installation. It also becomes sculptural, whether in the familiar forms of jars and flasks or in a relief sculpture, “Tulips Never Die.” The root-like tendrils of this elegant piece transform into flowers as they climb the wall. Interestingly, the clay’s color barely changes. But then just about everything here is earth-toned. For Kazemzadeh, tan, gray, and brown constitute a full rainbow.

Andrew Wohl, “Contemplative man in blue hoodie” (courtesy of the artist)

FACES EMERGE POWERFULLY FROM DARKNESS in Andrew Wohl’s photographic portraits, now on exhibit at Waverly Street Gallery. The grizzled visages in the local artist’s “The Drama of Portraiture” are usually framed not only by black backdrops but also by caps, hoods, or helmets. It’s as if these people -- mostly men, and apparently of limited means -- seek to disappear into their surroundings. Yet Wohl engages directly with his subjects, and draws smiles from many of them.

The inky environs seem to be essential to these pictures, and yet they’re actually the result of an experiment. Wohl’s usual procedure is to convert the original digital photo to sketchy black-and-white and replace the backgrounds with fields of white. With one new portrait, he altered this formula “on a whim,” according to his statement, and was “stunned and excited by the result.” So he returned to older pictures and rendered them in the same style, whose enveloping darkness is offset by vivid colors and luminous highlights on the brown or deeply tanned features.

One of the portraits, previously seen at last year’s Hill Center photography show, depicts a partly clad woman from the waist up. All the others focus tightly on faces, some of which engage directly with the camera. Shot with exceptionally narrow depth of field and printed larger than life-size, the images are striking but not glamorizing. With their ragged clothing, salt-and-pepper beards, and -- in one case -- defiant facial tattoos -- the photographer’s subjects look like outsiders most passersby would look away from. Wohl can’t transform the individuals’s lives, which are likely challenging. But he can change the way these people are seen.

Maske Maiden, “Saman” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE TITLE OF D.C. ARTS CENTER’S CURRENT SHOW suggests a lot more explicit commentary than is actually on display. “What Happens to a Dream Deferred? America at its 250th” does include some politically pointed prints by Holly Harris, who’s also showing softly representational oil paintings. The other two participants, Maske Maiden and Linda Obobaifo, offer ornate marks and collaged paintings, respectively.

The exhibition, which takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, was curated by Thu Anh Nguyen; she writes that her goal is “to capture the depth and breadth of American dreaming.” That effort ranges from Harris’s stark linocut responses to ICE and Israel’s bombing of Lebanon to Obobaifo’s layered artworks, whose use of lace, chiffon, and other fabrics is part of her exploration of “the roles of women and domesticity.”

All three artists, two of them local, mingle forthright elements with hidden ones. The Chicago-based Obobaifo combines smudgy colors, flowers cut from black fabric, and printed images that recall Warhol and Rauschenberg’s use of silkscreen, all designed to “conceal and reveal.” A Harris painting titled “Free Palestine, Free D.C.” might be a self-portrait, but its subject presents the viewer with the back of her head. Maiden (aka Sylvia Schieber) uses fund objects to construct face coverings that appear to draw on myths -- some of them possibly African -- but also to introduce new ones. Rather than the rationalist nation conceived by the founding fathers, Maiden imagines the United States as a land of gods and monsters, profuse and mysterious.

Kirsty Little, “Pea Tea Flower” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

METAL OBJECTS, MOSTLY WIRE, link the works in Kirsty Little’s half of “Feminine Perspectives.” The other participant in the show at the Ven at Embassy Row gallery, Pam Gregory, offers a more disparate array of paintings, photographs, and collages.

Little presents three sets of found-object sculptures. One consists of multiple rings of various sorts of wire, each grouping held in place by a short wooden piece whose curve echoes that of the metallic materials. Another combines items from the kitchen and wardrobe, yielding such intriguingly incongruous mashups as a grater festooned with colorful hat pins. Color is also key to the third bunch, in which bursts of fabric-wrapped wire are arranged to resemble flowers. Where most of the local artist’s constructions call attention to the original qualities of the materials, the ingredients of the bloom-like pieces feel transformed.

The most timely of Gregory’s gouaches in “Our Kennedy Center,” an upper-level gaze down at the Trump-battered facility’s lobby. The local artist’s style seems better suited, however, to simpler subjects, such as an outlined tree and a solitary person in a beach chair. Gregory is also showing two varieties of collages, including fairy-tale scenes punctuated with scraps of metal. Entirely different, but complementary to Little’s metal blossoms, are photographic closeups of flowers, notably a dahlia beaded with water drops. The two varieties of blooms are different in form but similar in their ability to draw the eye deep into their beguiling recesses.

peter campus: there somewhere

Through May 3 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. phillipscollection.org. 202-387-2151.

Nilou Kazemzadeh: I Witnessed the Garden Bear Fruit

Through May 2 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. hamiltonianartists.org. 202-332-1116.

Andrew Wohl: The Drama of Portraiture

Through May 2 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.

What Happens to a Dream Deferred? America at its 250th

Through May 2 at D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. dcartscenter.org. 202- 462-7833.

Kirsty Little & Pam Gregory: Feminine Perspectives

Through May 4 at the Ven at Embassy Row gallery, 2015 Massachusetts Ave. NW. 202-265-1600.

Barbara Bitondo, “Ethereal Threads” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

PAPER TAKES ON QUALITIES OF EARTH AND EVEN STONE in “Into the Layered Field,” which pairs the highly compatible work of Barbara Bitondo and Kristine DeNinno. The artists are local printmakers who incorporate sewing techniques into their abstract creations, but Bitondo takes a more sculptural approach. Her pieces are often curved or folded, while DeNinno evokes three-dimensional forms with compositions that are tightly outlined and sometimes bisected by white voids. As its title suggests, “Sands of Her Time II” takes the shape of an hourglass, but one that’s split in half by a bar of unprinted paper.

Some of DeNinno’s vertical banners, like ones she showed last year at Washington Printmakers Gallery, nestle vertical panels inside larger shapes. Employing different patterns and colors, the insets both contrast and complement their environments. DeNinno’s curtain-like works appear to reveal as well as conceal, showing interior and exterior all at once.

DeNinno’s pieces tend to be larger and more colorful than Bitondo’s, which are mostly in the shades of things buried or burned. (An exception is “Medium of Disappearance,” which sports intense blue blotches.) Aspects of clothing appear in her shaped prints, several of which are held together by a single button. But the constructions also resemble scrolls, waves, and canyons, and may hide images inside their crooks. While the colors evoke rock-solid objects, the forms are fragile, as if likely to erode over weeks rather than millennia. The mutability is, of course, Bitondo’s choice, yet it still feels poignant.

“Self Portrait: 24 years and 112 days, 3,055 Autosoft 90 Infusion Sets and counting” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

MUCH OF NICOLE MALOOF TWOMEY’S ART IS CANDY-COLORED, an irony that is entirely intentional. The local artist was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at 4, and has used more than estimated 3,000 diabetes infusion sets in her lifetime. Three thousand is just one of the numbers referenced in Twomey’s Stone Tower Gallery show, “180-300,” whose title refers to the additional health decisions that must be made daily by someone with the autoimmune disease.

Those infusion sets are an essential ingredient in Twomey’s symbolically autobiographical art. She melts and shapes the plastic discs into various forms: all-over, single-color, painting-like wall sculptures such as “Sneaking Lemon Drops,” or the oversized pseudo-sweets stuffed into “The Forbidden Candy Jar.” Eeriest is “Self Portrait: 24 years and 112 days, 3,055 Autosoft 90 Infusion Sets and counting,” a roughly human-shaped heap of hundreds of plastic discs on the floor. Most of the pieces are clear, but at the bottom are scarlet ones, evoking red blood cells. Danger lurks deep in the body.

The show includes actual paintings, including some whose dense fields of colorful blobs could be read as purely abstract in another context. A more literal picture, also partly sculptural, is a tightly spaced landscape of round, spiraling, and heart-shaped confections. It’s a vision of candy-counter bliss that, for some, is a deadly serious warning.

Bryan Jernigan, “The Sound of Line 1 & 2” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

PAINTINGS ARE ALL COLOR AND LINE, but they resonate as something more than formal exercises. The local artist takes inspiration from geography, both rural and urban, for the mixed-media pictures in “Sound of Line,” his Park View Gallery show. But the wiry pencil, pastel, or charcoal marks that underlie the color blocks also suggest architecture, especially when Jernigan draws arch-like shapes. The sketchy lines also pack metaphorical meaning: In his statement, the artist teases several possibilities, including the links of “a city built on networking.”

The smudgy and sometimes drippy colors of these paintings, all titled “Sound of Line “ plus a number, are usually subdued and often dark. But the compositions include panes of bold orange, bright aqua, and other exuberant hues. Some of the geometric forms are solid and hard-edged, while others are tentative and seemingly unfinished. The juxtaposition recalls Cubism and Futurism, which attempted to represent various states in the same picture plane. In one dimension, Jernigan’s artworks are finished; in another, they’re still in process.

Two of Jernigan’s pictures, by the way, are among the most appealing entries in “2026 Yellow Barn Studio Instructors Exhibition,” the show group downstairs from Park View at Popcorn Gallery.

Alexander D’Agostino, “Fairy Kings Grimoire, page 40” (Transformer)

WHEN PLANNING HIS SHOWS, Alexander D’Agostino considers the history of the venues as well as customary concerns, which include magic and queerness. For his 2023 exhibition at the Torpedo Factory, the Baltimore artist investigated the building’s earlier use as a federal records center. Now his Transformer show, “Something Wicked,” invokes the gallery’s previous use as a shop for a supposed psychic.

D’Agostino’s style of occultism is less commercially oriented. He’s an artistic search fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he’s studied the role of witchcraft in such plays as MacBeth -- the well-known source of this show’s title -- and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The latter’s Oberon, king of the fairies, is among the players in D’Agostino’s collaged grimoires, books of spells that also incorporate vintage gay-porn images. Working with weathered old texts seems to have influenced the treatment of the artist’s self-made books, which are painstakingly battered, stained, and water-damaged.

These faux-antique volumes sit alongside inkjet-print collages and other artifacts in a show that’s essentially an installation. Pink curtains cloak the gallery’s storefront, and much of the floor is devoted to a mystical portal that features, curiously, six-pointed stars rather than the usual pentagrams. That’s one of the good things about dabbling in sorcery in a post-magical age: You can throw whatever ingredients you like into the witches’s cauldron.

CHERRY BLOSSOM SEASON HAS BEEN CELEBRATED annually at Artechouse since it 2017 opening. With its tech-art showcase temporarily closed for renovations, Artechouse developed “Peak Bloom: Dome Experience” for Hi-Lawn at Union Market, the food hall’s rooftop venue. The video sequence offers a 22-minute array of spiraling blooms and other forms, including butterflies and confetti-like colored dabs.

Previous blossom-themed Artechouse shows have been impressively ambitious, and sometimes tinged with dystopian discontent. “Peak Bloom” is simpler, as it must be. Hi-Lawn’s dome doesn’t have the space, or the technology, of Artechouse. But the presentation is lively, colorful, and immersive. Set to an impressionist electro-piano score punctuated by occasional techno thumps, the projected shapes whirl upward, as if pirouetting through and beyond the dome. Viewers can slump in pink beanbag chairs and watch the virtual flowers, already tantalizingly out of reach, spin ever further away.

Barbara Bitondo & Kristine DeNinno: Into the Layered Field

Through May 2 at Portico Gallery at Studio 3807, 3807 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. portico3807.com. 202-487-8458.

Nicole Maloof Twomey: 180-300

Through April 26 at Stone Tower Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Bryan Jernigan: The Sound of Line

Through April 25 at Park View Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/parkviewgallery. 301-634-2274.

Alexander D’Agostino: Something Wicked

Through April 25 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.

Peak Bloom: Dome Experience

Through April 26 at Hi-Lawn at Union Market, 1309 5th St, NE. hilawndc.com/thedomedc-peakbloom