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

Robert Rauschenberg, “Chinese Summerhall” (detail) (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS “COMBINES,” chunky painting-sculpture mashups made mostly in the 1950s. But he was always involved in prints, photography, and other works on paper. So it’s fitting that the centerpiece of the Academy Art Museum’s “Rauschenberg 100: New Connections” resulted from the artist’s 1982 trip to Jingxian, China to visit the world’s oldest known paper mill. The modernist made a pilgrimage to the cradle of his most ancient material.

The title of the small yet impressive show suggests a centenary retrospective for Rauschenberg, who was born in 1925. (He died in 2008.) But the exhibition, which was curated by Lee Glazer, is much more narrowly focused than that. One gallery holds “Chinese Summerhall,” a seldom-exhibited photo-montage panorama printed on a single 100-foot-long sheet of paper. Two other spaces are devoted to “studies,” which are prints of some of the over 500 photos the artist made during his Chinese sojourn. These ancillary works include some single shots and also a few photos montaged in the manner of the magnum opus, but on a smaller scale.

Among the studies are two prints of one of the most striking pictures from the 100-foot scroll: an image of a person who stands, back to the viewer, in front of a hanging display of cloths in a rainbow of hues. It’s the most colorful photo in a series that’s often keyed to the tones of dirt, muck, and weathered stone. (A picture of a bamboo forest is almost black and white.) Many of the other studies employ photos that were not incorporated into the larger work, notably a shot of the Great Wall that’s more expansive than the scroll’s pictures, most of which are closeups.

Invited to a China that was still generally secluded from the West, Rauschenberg said that he would not try to “editorialize, moralize, or criticize.” This was politically circumspect, although it might also reflect Pop art’s preference for observation over analysis. Chinese vernacular culture, although not then as garishly commercialized as the West’s, could be viewed just as dispassionately. His approach, the artist noted, was to present the images as “not a story” but just “here.”

The scroll’s photos often emphasize shape, texture, or light over subject matter. The artist rhymes some images, such as in a series of depictions of lamps and ceiling lights. Other pictures are juxtaposed in harsh dialogue, as when a golden lion perches between photos, respectively, of a battered industrial device and a patch of muddy earth. When Rauschenberg focused his camera more widely, he sometimes produced photos of conventional documentary interest, such as a shot of hundreds of parked bicycles.

The scroll is mounted in a gallery that just fits it, and is wrapped into an almost-loop. The piece is not meant to be a complete circle, however. If its beginning could be anywhere, its end is clearly designated by the artist’s signature on a black panel. The overall effect suggests a traditional Chinese hand scroll, fully unfurled, and rendered in muted colors that echo the grays of Chinese ink painting. Some observers have likened the meandering artwork to the Great Wall itself.

According to the museum, “Rauschenberg 100: New Connections” marks the first time this edition of the scroll has been seen in its entirety. (There are four other copies, one of which is owned by the National Gallery of Art.) At an event at the museum, Christopher Rauschenberg, the artist’s son, said that the majority of people who have seen this iteration of the work have probably seen it in Easton.

That’s not a coincidence. Rauschenberg made his reputation in New York, but spent most of his life on Captiva Island in Florida. One of his essential collaborators was Don Saff, who founded Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Saff not only helped print “Chinese Summerhall”; he also accompanied its maker on his photographic foray to China. (The show includes a photo in which Saff lugs Rauschenberg’s camera.) Saff later relocated to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he continued to work with Rauschenberg -- and where he lives still.

The printing of “Chinese Summerhall” on a single roll of paper was an astonishing technical accomplishment, completed a mere day before the artwork’s scheduled New York opening, and after many mishaps. All that bother would be unnecessary today, of course. Digital imaging would simplify every aspect of the project, although it might add a new problem. Rauschenberg made about 500 photos in China; outfitted with a digital camera, he might have shot thousands, and spent years editing them. “Chinese Summerhall” is a sweeping work, but one that was materially shaped by technical limitations. It shows us China in 1982 just as Rauschenberg was able, both culturally and technologically, to see it.

Ernest Cox, “Requiem III” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

DON SAFF ALSO PLAYED A ROLE in another show at the museum, “A Fragile Symbiosis: The Sculpture of Ernest Cox.” A colleague of Saff in both Florida and Maryland, Cox (1937-2024) became a longtime Easton resident. He made wall-mounted sculptural assemblages from found objects, often significantly reshaped. Such recognizable metal artifacts as shovels or oil drums are cut or crushed, and the pieces then tidily welded together. The sculptures usually array multiple elements, and sometimes contrast industrial objects with organic ones.

Like Rauschenberg, Cox was clearly influenced by Dadaism and Duchamp. But where the better-known artist’s combines are haphazard and even anarchic, Cox’s style is orderly and his craft immaculate. Central features are carefully framed, and sometimes recessed into their casings, like the barbed-wire “X” nestled tightly into “Stele’s” X-shaped slits. Cox worked briefly at GM’s styling division, and such faux machines as “V-8” -- which includes a Ford V-8 emblem -- are suitably gleaming and streamlined. Another sculpture places a ragged bomb fragment inside a hot-pink neon circle, which glows obliviously around the menace.

The artist plays all this metal against symbols of nature, including models of animal skulls, bundles of twigs, and a small bouquet of plastic roses. But in this show, which was curated by Brain J. Lang, such talismans can’t compete with the substances that seem to have been closest to Cox’s art. His sculptures, bristling and hard-edged, are not really an appropriate environment for flowers. Cox’s enthusiasm for sleek steel, however playfully manipulated, is more in sync with Italian futurism than contemporary eco-art.

Anne Lindberg, “seen and unseen” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AS ETHEREAL AS COX’S WORK IS BRAWNY, Anne Lindberg’s sculptures are made of colored thread strung along and across walls. The title piece of her Academy Art Museum show, “seen and unseen,” is a shimmering rainbow of strands that roughly parallels the floor of the building’s second-floor mezzanine, and thus can be seen from beside or below. The positioning is a bit problematic. Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” was easier to apprehend during its 2023 installation at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.

Lindberg, who was a resident artist at the Academy Museum last year, is also showing four painting-drawings that complement her threaded piece. Made with graphite, colored pencil, and several kinds of paint, these pictures consist of thin horizontal lines atop shifting color fields, heavy on lime green. Some bars of colors are superimposed on segments of the canvas-spanning lines, paralleling the thinner marks while gently disrupting them. Given their format, the paintings can’t be as diaphanous or mutable as the artist’s stringy sculptures. But they underscore that Lindberg’s expertise is in light, color, and implied motion.

(A note to Washington area residents who, like me, don’t drive: The trip to Easton by public transportation takes less than two hours, but involves several connections and is not cheap.)

Rauschenberg 100: New Connections

A Fragile Symbiosis: The Sculpture of Ernest Cox

Anne Lindberg: seen and unseen

Rauschenberg through May 3; Cox through May 24; Lindberg through fall 2026. All at Academy Art Museum, 106 South St., Easton, Md. academyartmuseum.org. 420-822-2787.

Carol Brown Goldberg, “Solar Moon” (Addison/Ripley Fine Arts)

NOT EXACTLY A RETROSPECTIVE, CAROL BROWN GOLDBERG’S Addison/Ripley Fine Art show features many works made in the last few years. But “Morphic Resonance: memories communicated across space & time” reaches as far back as 1968 for three small drawing-paintings and -- most intriguingly -- includes several pieces made over a course of multiple years. “Landscape Under Moon” is dated 1978-2026, which means it was in process for the suburban Maryland artist’s entire public career.

Most of these pictures are representational but not literal, drawing inspiration from French post-impressionism. In Goldberg’s intentionally flat renderings, abundant vegetation and starry nights are contained within black outlines, suggesting pop-art reincarnations of Van Gogh and his contemporaries. One title invokes Gauguin, and the lush “To Wonder Do I Dare, Do I Dare?” (from 1982) has a tropical vibe that recalls that artist’s South Seas period.

Goldberg has previously shown paintings that are in this style but are stripped of color, so as to create a sense of profusion purely through tightly interlocking forms. In 2026’s “From Bilibin to Kandinsky I,” the foregrounded grasses are monochromatic but frame a house slathered in bold, chocolatey browns. (Ivan Bilibin was a Russian illustrator whose intricate pictures have an Art Nouveau feel.) Even wilder is the undulating “My Powhatan Ave.,” which depicts a house that appears to be liquefying.

The exhibition consists mostly of paintings but includes prints and small sculptures. Many of the pictures incorporate pulverized glass to add sparkle, a strategy that echoes the artist’s use of polymer particles in her elegant abstractions based on grids of hundreds of circles. But Goldberg can conjure luminosity simply with shape and color, as in the print “Solar Moon.” Set off by a black backdrop, a lone tree’s leaves appear to spin in sync with a red moon’s beams, all spiraling in cosmic harmony.

Alan Sislen, “Curved Perspectives” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IS A BOON for photographers, if perhaps for few others. Buildings with sculptural forms and reflective facades make for dramatic, multi-layered, light-refracting images. Not all the structures depicted in Alan Sislen’s “Ambiguity” are post-WWII -- one picture bends the massive interior columns of the 139-year-old National Building Museum -- but most are examples of the International Style or more recent vogues. These buildings, often in New York City, provide the Bethesda-based photographer with scenes of streamlined near-abstraction or even readymade surrealism.

The show’s crisp, immaculately composed pictures are all black-and-white, invoking the futurism of a bygone era. At least one appears to be stitched together digitally, exploiting a more recent method. Humans materialize occasionally, but just as cogs in architectural mechanisms, or perhaps inmates in glass-skinned prisons. In a set of three photos of people on spiraling stairs, the situation appears everyday yet quietly ominous. The up-and-down motion has a sense of futile endlessness, while the glistening structure fragments the action in a manner that suggests Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”

If such pictures detail the built world’s dominance of humanity, Sislen also accentuates some architecture’s affinity with natural forms. In three photos of the eccentric staircases recently added to D.C.’s rigidly geometric Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the photographer makes the multi-story portals look like organic orifices. Even more abstruse are the five “Tonality” shots, essays in gray gradations and enigmatic curves. The sense of scale vanishes, so what may well be closeups of tiny objects become boundless universes.

Sally Veach, “Human Nature 29 B” (detail) (The Athenaeum)

THE WORLD LURKS BEHIND VEILS in the paintings of Elizabeth Coffey and Sally Veach, who are showing together in the Athenaeum’s “What Will Persist.” The two artists use different techniques and depict disparate subjects, but with visually kindred results. Coffey’s renderings of women’s faces partially hide behind lace curtains, as if to cloister them in a seemingly genteel past. Veach’s pictures foreground silhouetted foliage, and invoke art history by using replicas of 18th- and 19th-century paintings as backdrops.

Coffey’s women tend to be young and pretty, and her renderings of them --- often in diptychs of the same face -- don’t convey much character. Instead, the Richmond artist complicates her portraits with layers of gauzy textiles, sometimes misaligned and partially hanging off the bottom of the canvas. Epigrammatic text superimposed on the second of two visages adds another level of meaning: “If Not You Who,” ask the large block letters overlaid on one picture. It’s as if Coffey is urging her subjects to emerge from their lacy seclusion -- to act, and to be fully seen.

There’s a laciness to the botanical forms Veach positions on top of multiple visual strata, and the Alexandria-based artist highlights the qualities of fabric by fringing the edges of some canvases. Such small details play neatly against the grandeur of the appropriated paintings, which include Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” an exemplar of 19th-century German romanticism. Like Coffey, Veach partially cloaks her subjects, but offers a sense of a potential breakthrough. The essence peeks through, ready to be revealed.

John Aquilino, “Sunlight on the Roof” (Calloway Fine Art and Consulting)

STRAIGHT LINES AND RIGHT ANGLES, but also shadows, link the artworks in “Constructive Engagement: A Visual Dialogue Between John Aquilino and Andrew Sovjani.” Both artists in the Calloway Fine Art and Consulting exhibition might be called, winkingly, architectural illustrators. Aquilino paints pictures of tightly spaced urban buildings, often from a vantage point that allows a view of the roof and such top-of-the-line structures as water tanks. Sovjani places books (and occasionally other objects) in building-like arrangements that he photographs, yielding pictures to which he may add drawn or painted accents.

Aquilino’s strategy is to paint in a flattened style that contrasts his pictures’s compositional depth. The local artist revels in other disparities as well, focusing on the way recent and older buildings coexist, however awkwardly. The structures he depicts are often faced in warm shades of orange, yellow, and brick red, colors he pits against areas of blue shadows. These, although also rendered flatly, evoke deep pools. Aquilino’s cityscapes look familiar, but the eye can get lost in the details.

The stacked books in Sovjani’s embellished photos resemble mechanisms as well as buildings, so it’s fitting that some of the two-volume layouts in “Fact and Fiction” suggest the machine-like towers of Le Corbusier’s city plans. That picture is one of several with a sumptuous blue background, but Sovjani’s most favored hue is white. The Massachusetts artist’s “What I Lived For” is all ivory on a black backdrop, so that the books look to be to made of porcelain -- a likeness the artist accentuates by placing a small ceramic flask amid the arrayed tomes. In Sovjani’s found-object landscapes, every element becomes an objet d’art.

Yemonja Smalls, “No ToxiciTEA” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AFTERNOON TEA IS SERVED REGULARLY at the Mansion at Strathmore, so perhaps it was inevitable that tea would become the subject of an exhibition at the venue. “Steeped,” curated by Daryl Paterson and Adah Rose Bitterbaum, marks the 40th anniversary of the mansion’s teas. The mostly cozy show offers the work of nearly 80 artists, many of who contribute actual tea vessels.

Afternoon tea, often confused by Americans with working-class “high tea,” is associated with the United Kingdom. Deborah Schindler makes that connection with a playful linocut of a teapot-shaped queen who appears to be Victorian. But more of the artworks look toward tea’s Asian origins. Suzanne Updike’s elegant print depicts a Japanese-style studded-metal teapot in green-accented black, and Ruby Silvious wove a kimono primarily from used tea bags.

Although the selection features many ceramic tea vessels in traditional styles, Silvious-style whimsy is not uncommon. Tim Aley hewed a sleek wooden teapot in the shape of a beehive, while Nancy Zimler’s streamlined pots incorporate metal found objects as handles. The actual consumption of tea is not among “Steeped’s” primary themes, but Yemonja Smalls “No ToxiciTEA” is an appealingly funky exception. In this sculptural assemblage, a woman stretches toward the viewer a hand that clutches a cup filled with sequin-crusted green. The glisteningly simulated tea makes this sculpture appear to be the show’s only caffeinated work.

Carol Brown Goldberg: Morphic Resonance: memories communicated across space & time

Through April 24 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Allen Sislen: Ambiguity

Through April 19 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

Elizabeth Coffey & Sally Veach: What Will Persist

Through April 19 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Constructive Engagement: A Visual Dialogue Between John Aquilino and Andrew Sovjani

Through April 18 at Calloway Fine Art and Consulting, 1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW. callowayart.com. 202-965-4601.

Steeped

Through April 22 at the Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. www.strathmore.org. 301-581-5109.

Ellington Robinson, “On the Oracle” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ELLINGTON ROBINSON IS A GEOGRAPHER OF SORTS, but the territory he charts is as much psychological as physical. The D.C. artist, who teaches at two local colleges and spends part of his time in the Virgin Islands, makes mixed-media drawings and paintings that sometimes incorporate found objects or escape the picture plane entirely. One key to his immaculately executed work is the title of his Spilt Gallery show, “Place Time - A Marronage.” Marronage was a term for the escape of enslaved people of African origin, who formed communities in remote areas, notably but not exclusively in the Caribbean region.

Two large drawings the artist calls “architectonics” actually look more like topographics, albeit imaginary ones. These elaborate graphite renderings are embellished gently by ink, colored pencil, and tiny plastic discs. The pictures seem partly abstractions, partly aerial views of mountainous territory. The vantage also looks to be straight down in “Atlantic Ouroboros,” which could depict a craggy coast and the adjacent ocean, vivid blue edged in green. “Akwamu,” whose liquid forms center on a collision of gorgeous mineral tones, ruby and turquoise, appears even less literal. But it’s named for an actual place, an empire that arose in the 17th century in what is now Ghana.

More than a decade ago, Robinson had a show at Project 4 Gallery (a precursor of the new Spilt) whose landscape-like abstractions were punctuated by patterns that resembled railroad tracks. One of the apparent inspirations for his recent work seems to be sailing ships; several of these pieces incorporate ropes and cleats, perhaps to anchor themselves in the world.

The largest of these moored pieces is the elegant “On The Oracle,” a rounded wooden semicircle form painted blue with cloud-like patches of white. The construction is sliced into three parts, with the center portion elevated as if in the process of escaping. Cleats are attached to the two side pieces, and ropes tether them to a stack of bricks. If this is a vision of the world’s coming apart, it’s a very tidy one. Whatever alarms Robinson may deliver, his craftsmanship is eminently reassuring.

Diana Al-Hadid, “Lionless” (de la Cruz Gallery)

THE SENSE OF ENTERING DIANA AL-HAHID’S WORLD is literal at the multi-media artist’s show at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, “unbecoming.” A large ragged archway bisects the gallery, so that visitors must travel through the Brooklynite’s realm of lacy, seemingly unraveling forms. Al-Hadid produces prints and sculptures, but most of the pieces in this show are made of paper and fabric pulp, sometimes reinforced by steel and fiberglass. These apparently fragile constructions appear to be clumping and dissolving at the same time.

The latter process is one meaning of “unbecoming,” which can also refer to things that are inappropriate or unattractive. The term is a rebuke that has commonly been directed at women, whose status is an essential theme of Al-Hadid’s art. Among the mythical and literary figures she depicts -- so loosely as to be abstract -- are Scheherazade, said to have saved 1,001 women’s lives by spinning tales to distract a murderous king.

Al-Hadid was born in Syria, and moved to the United States when she was five. In addition to exalting Scheherazade, the artist invokes the land of her birth with a bronze of a jasmine plant, Syria’s national flower. Not all of Al-Hadid’s cultural references are to the Middle East, however. Two of her pictures loosely portray Medusa, the goddess of Greek myth long considered a monster but more recently claimed as a feminist icon. A print and a mixed-media assemblage are based on a 1475 German-Flemish allegorical painting in which a woman’s chastity is shielded by a mountain and guarded by lions.

One of Al-Hadid’s riffs on this 15th-century canvas is aptly titled “Lionless.” There’s a lot of “less” in the artist’s work, much of which is characterized by cracks and voids and partly drained of color. This show, which was organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Assistant Curator Rachel Winter, has an almost geological feel -- it’s full of crags and chasms. But these features aren’t just exercises in sensuous disarray. They’re also expressions of historical gaps and psychic breaches.

Hwang Nam Kyu, “Sweet Dream” (Korean Cultural Center)

AN ANTHOLOGY OF SLIGHTLY EERIE TOY STORIES, the Korean Cultural Center’s current show combines child-like enthusiasms with high-tech precision. The six contributors to “Transcending Boundaries: Discovering Contemporary Korean Artists” often depict as hard-edged icons such soft things as apples, flowers, and hearts. Even Sung Jin Min, whose abstractions attempt to convey sensations and the nature of time, makes loose paintings that are composed so tightly that they suggest Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-art parodies of expressionist brushstrokes.

Even tighter are the brightly colored pictures of Park Jae Young, who renders a world whose every object -- candles, smiley faces, soft ice cream -- appears to be knitted of wool. Similarly, Shin So Young paints wings, often furled into the shapes of hearts, in a mode that is both elegant and cartoonish. Equally meticulous but more surreal are the pink-heavy oils of Kim Min Jeong, whose principal subjects seem to be flowers, but ones that sometimes have doll-baby faces.

Hwang Nam Kyu is a sculptor whose painted-metal apples sport a high-gloss finish that resembles the sleek surfaces furnished by the show’s three representational painters. Like Kim Min Jeong, Hwang insinuates a human presence, posing small stick-figure people on the gleaming but sometimes intentionally flawed fruit. They’re dwarfed by the apples, but seem more oblivious than intimidated.

Human faces gaze out from some of Kim Jing Wuk’s holograms, the show’s least traditional artworks. The smallest of the venue’s three galleries is darkened and devoted entirely to these green-tinted, two-layer artworks, which complement the other five artists’s juxtaposition of realism and unreality. Appropriately, one of the holograms depicts a toy robot. For all the grown-up sophistication of these artists’s styles, childhood seems central to their outlooks.

Jason Sho Green, “Secret Society” (Morton Fine Art)

THE DOMESTICATED FAUNA THE JAPANESE CALL “SALARYMEN” seek nature in Jason Sho Green’s recent paintings. The pictures in “This Is a Garden and We’re All Flowers,” Green’s Morton Fine Art show, are partly transcendental and partly satirical. Inspired by his stints in corporate jobs, the Japanese-American artist depicts besuited men who sprawl in clearings, perch in tree canopies, and attempt to shake hands with branches.

These jokey scenarios lampoon contemporary urbanites’s ambiguous relationship with the natural world, but also demonstrate a Shinto-like reverence for skies, woods, and mountains, and especially bathing spots in the wild. In “Secret Society,” a half-dozen naked figures lounge in a forest pool, their pink flesh gleaming in turquoise water. Green often keys his paintings to shades of blue, which range from the light aqua of “Hideaway” -- another pool party -- to numerous nighttime scenes whose blues tick toward midnight.

The artist, who lives and works in upstate New York, paints loosely in a style that occasionally suggests Matisse. His figures are cartoony, and sometimes appear to grow out of an elementary pattern: The rubbery man at the center of “Flower Power” can be seen as an extension of the curling stripes on his pants. But then curving lines, whether of a tree’s trunk or an elaborate series of switchbacks, are typical of Green’s compositions. The artist was previously an electrical engineer, so it seems telling that his paintings contain so few straight lines. Green’s curvilinear images, just like his forests and ponds, are a form of escape.

Linda Atkinson, “Housebound” (Zenith Gallery)

SHOWS AT ZENITH GALLERY ARE MERE RIPPLES in the ocean of art that fills the jam-packed venue. That’s especially true of the current “48th Anniversary Exhibition,” which contains work by about 60 artists. Many of these will be familiar to Zenith regulars, and some pieces are still in place from last month’s Black-history show.

Fittingly, one of the highlights is a picture of a gallery -- the National one, rendered by Bradley Stevens with his customary fastidiousness. The painting is named for another painting depicted within it: “The Prodigal Son,” by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Stevens’s neoclassical style is welcome at Zenith, but not typical of the gallery’s fare. The current selection includes lots of sculptures, and several paintings that verge on sculpture. Among the intriguing smaller pieces are a half dozen house-shaped wooden blocks by Linda Atkinson. While most of them are painted, the most striking is a mahogany mini-mansion bound in twine that appears to be cutting into it. The sculpture is powerful as a metaphor of confinement, and also as a subversion of its materials’s innate qualities.

Wood is impersonated by paper in Roni Jolles’s diptych of a grove of birch trees, some of which are 3D and placed literally in the foreground. Only slightly flatter is Carolyn Goodridge’s luminous encaustic painting of a cosmic orb whose surface is traced by a beautiful green corona. The picture fits well with Patricia Skinner’s lush pastel of a near-eclipse, whose complex texture is partly due to its rendering on sandpaper; and a characteristically fluid Anne Marchand painting that’s purely abstract but includes a translucent white orb that could be a moon. All these pictures are in Zenith’s basement, but are looking at the stars.

Ellington Robinson: Place Time - A Marronage

Through April 18 at Spilt, 2529 P St. NW. spiltdc.com.

Transcending Boundaries: Discovering Contemporary Korean Artists

Through April 10 at the Korean Cultural Center, 2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW. washingtondc.korean-culture.org/en. 202-939-5688.

Diana Al-Hadid: unbecoming

Through April 12 at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University, 3535 Prospect St. NW. delacruzgallery.org. 202-687-8039.

Jason Sho Green: This Is a Garden and We’re All Flowers

Through April 18 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. 202-628-2787. Open by appointment.

48th Anniversary Exhibition

Through April 18 at Zenith Gallery, 1429 Iris St. NW. zenithgallery.com. -202- 783-2963.

Joan Danziger, “Sunshine Girl Love Band” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

JOAN DANZIGER HAS TWO DIFFERENT SHOWS currently at the American University Museum. Or, one might say, two different Joan Danzigers have shows currently at the museum.

The larger of the exhibitions, both of which were curated by museum director Jack Rasmussen, is “The Magical World of Joan Danziger,” a wide-ranging retrospective. It includes many of the whimsical, human-sized sculptures for which the 91-year-old D.C. artist is known. But the selection also reveals her earlier work, reaching as far back as 1958, a decade before the New York City native relocated to Washington.

While all of Danziger’s art could be categorized as surrealist, her pre-1968 drawings and paintings are starker and sometimes more grotesque. The artist’s best-known pieces suggest children’s-book illustrations that wriggled off the page and grew into towering mixed-media sculptures. She began, however, in a more ominous mode. The pre-D.C. pieces feature some of the same visual motifs as the later ones, but are rendered in a severe style that appears more indebted to European precursors. (One of her influences is Lenore Carrington, the British surrealist who spent much of her life in Mexico, where she explored themes both psychological and mythological.)

Many Danziger sculptures take the form of anthropomorphisized animals, some of whom look like creatures freed from an old-fashioned merry-go-round. So it’s intriguing to encounter the artist’s 1958 painting, “Carousel,” in which some people ride a merry-go-round while others dance in a circle in front of it. Save for a few owls, all the figures in the picture are human, and are naked. The painting is not confrontational, but it is wilder than the animal-musicians of “Sunshine Girl Love Band,” all of whom are fully clothed.

In addition to hybrid animal-humans, Danziger’s mostly peaceable kingdom is full of trees, flowers, musical instruments, bicycles, and scooters. Much of her imagery is fanciful: A rhino transforms into a tree, a basket of fish perches incongruously amid a large sculptural flower arrangement, and ceremonial statues of cats dominate a diorama of an Egyptian-style temple. Yet the overall impression is of pleasant daydreams, not nightmares.

Joan Danziger, “Inferno” and other ravens (photo by Mark Jenkins)

Gallery goers probably won’t immediately notice some of the most recent works, oversized beetles constructed of glass shards. They’re mounted high on the wall, almost out of sight. These glimmering insects are cousins to the hard-edged sculptures in the adjacent show, “Ravens: Spirits of the Sky.” Made between 2023 and 2025, the birds represent a far more feral breed of fantastic beast than the artist’s scooter-riding bird or sousaphone-playing giraffe.

Like Danziger’s earlier sculptures, the ravens are built on wire armatures. But the skeletons of her trademark creations are covered in clay or fiberglass, which is rounded and painted to give the statues a cozier aspect. The ravens are made of sharp, jagged pieces, usually in a single color or a narrow range of similar hues. These red, blues, and greens are luminously unnaturalistic, even when they’re dark enough to approach the ebony of an actual raven’s plumage.

The artist has called ravens “demons of death,” and this fierceness is sometimes conveyed by the prey in their mouth: doomed frogs and beetles, also made of glass, are clenched in resolute jaws. The ravens use their mouths to kill, not to play music.

The ravens are edgier than the artist’s best-known sculptures. They’re also more beautiful. Whether perched or suspended in midair, the birds catch, refract, and intensify the light. The resulting sparkle complements the potency of the ravens’s forms, which are elegant yet craggy. Danziger’s demons of death bristle like assemblages of glass daggers, giving them a sense of menace that is entirely welcome.

Dudung Alie Syahbana, “Ombauk Laut” (Amy Kaslow Gallery)

PATTERNS ARE INHERENT IN TEXTILES, since they’re constructed from individual fibers. Such motifs can be barely noticeable or fundamental, and examples of each approach are included in Amy Kaslow Gallery’s “Folk Art Is Fine Art: Textiles that Talk.” This wide-ranging show offers fabric art by 22 artists or collectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Much of the work resulted from the efforts of organizers or groups who seek to better the lives of vulnerable women.

The talking that these pieces do is mostly rhythmic, but the selection includes some narrative imagery, as well as designs with supernatural intent. One notable example of the latter is a cosmic banner made by Turkish and Armenian artists led by Mehmet Çetinkaya. This dynamic piece features a magic eye meant to protect girls and women.

Basic needlework can become embellishment, as in the traditional Bengali pieces made at Basha, which employs 120 at-risk women. In quilts made of repurposed saris, colorful target shapes are accented by regularly spaced white stitches, simple and inexorable. In a much more affluent country, Japan, Tsuyo Onodera takes a more free-form approach to stitching together worn kimonos, with beautifully battered results.

The show’s palette is mostly earthy, so the blue figure in a reverse-applique piece by Panama’s Guna Artists is strikingly unexpected. The color suggests water, an elemental source of found patterns and endless variations. This is the explicit inspiration for Dudung Alie Syahbana’s “Ombauk Laut (Ocean Waves, Blue),” an example of Javanese batik on silk. Like so much of this show, the piece appears rooted in tradition and yet contemporary.

Saddle cover, Iran, 1800-1825 (The Textile Museum Collection)

AMONG THE ITEMS PRODUCED BY ÇETINKAYA’S WORKSHOP is a depiction of “storm catchers” on horseback, rendered flatly yet energized by vibrant hues. This piece is “Textiles that Talk’s” only representation of the creature at the center of “Adorning the Horse: Equestrian Textiles for Power & Prestige.” The latter exhibition, at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, includes two life-sized 3D horses, but they’re just mannequins whose purpose is to showcase a few of the more than 60 saddle covers, horse covers and blankets, and related objects on display.

Two aspects of the exhibition are timely, although only one of those is by the design of co-curators Lee Talbot and Sumru Belger Krody: According to the Asian zodiac, this is the year of the horse. The other is less auspicious: The largest number of objects, 19, is from currently embattled Iran. (Tibet is second with 17.)

Textiles are fragile, so most of the items date from the 19th century or later. Yet the assembled rarities include one exceptionally antique horse cover, made in central Asia between the fifth and seventh centuries. The faded piece is not the most colorful thing on display, but its intricate design intriguingly features not just horses but other creatures, some of them far from naturalistic.

Many of the design motifs seen here are abstract, probably in large part because of Islam’s proscription on depicting sentient beings. But a Chinese robe -- made for rider, not steed -- sports a dragon, and a blue Japanese “rump cover” is decorated with white rabbits in reference to a much-told folk tale. Such embellishments suggest that the horse was prized not only for its strength and endurance, but also a symbol of mankind’s interconnection with all of nature.

The Magical World of Joan Danziger

Joan Danziger: Ravens: Spirits of the Sky

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

Folk Art Is Fine Art: Textiles that Talk

Through April 5 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Adorning the Horse: Equestrian Textiles for Power & Prestige

Through June 20 at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum, 701 21st St. NW. museum.gwu.edu. 202-994-5200.

Geoff Desobry, “The Escapee” (Waverly Street Gallery)

GEOFF DESOBRY’S EXPRESSIONIST SKETCHES of faces are first impressions, but deepened by second thoughts. The 16 drawings in “Untamed Spirits,” the local artist’s Waverly Street Gallery show, center on a few angular lines. These convey the basic elements of a human visage: eyes, a nose, only sometimes a mouth. The quick figurative strokes are in black, and often accented by touches of blue and green. Yet the strongest contrast to the improvised gestures is provided by soft, mostly gray tones that conjure shadows, whether on the face or behind it.

The goal is represent people who “thrive connected to wildness,” according to the artist’s statement. The pictures’s titles range from “Determination,” the only picture with a fully dark background, to “The Prisoner,” an eyeless visage that’s the most abstracted of the renderings. In both cases, the primary lines appear light and even ephemeral, yet are weighted by smudgy shadowing that give depth and substance to cheeks, eye sockets, and other contours that elude direct light. The spirits may be wild, but darkness anchors them in place.

Desobry’s drawings are neatly complemented by several Cristian Ianculescu sculptures, also of faces. Some of these also have a sketchy quality, even though they’re rendered in marble or alabaster. The one most akin to the pastel pictures is “The Argument Within,” which boxes a face into the tight confines of a vertical bar. (A possible alternate title? “The Prisoner.”)

In this array, Ianculescu’s style ranges more widely than Desobry’s. “What Remains” is the most naturalistic, and “Janus in Suspension” the most mythological. The Roman god’s countenances aren’t on opposite sides of his hand but instead at some distance from each other, linked by tendrils of carved-marble hair. It seems appropriate that the wildest of the local sculptor’s offerings depicts more than one face.

Gregory Newcomb, untitled (Foundry Gallery)

THE PICTURES IN FOUNDRY GALLERY’S CURRENT SHOW are mostly sketches of mostly naked humans, captured during the venue’s weekly figure-drawing sessions. But a few of the 15 artists depart significantly from the premise of “The Sketches: A Figure Drawing Exhibit.” Alan Hirsch’s entries are digitally altered photographs in which flesh is distorted and body parts sometimes oddly doubled. Travis Clark’s comic-book-like renderings of female nudes are fully realized, without a hint of sketchiness.

Even among the artists who take a more traditional approach, there’s plenty of variation. Elegantly finishing pencil drawings with watercolor, Stefano Scafetta often depicts models who are clothed. Matt Malone’s raw style recalls pre-Cubist Picasso, notably in a picture of four overlapped reclining bodies. Both Xiaowei Song and Gregory Newcomb stress animal-like in rear views of lithe figures. Annika Bjorkholm neatly abstracts figures she outlines in white on tan paper.

Colored paper also features in the superb pictures of Luis Zanforin, who draws with the assurance of a Renaissance master. Made with chalk and charcoal, usually on dark gray sheets, the artist’s pictures are beautifully modeled and shaded to convey mass and contour. These are sketches, but endowed with such cunning detail that they appear intensely physical.

Abol Bahadori, “Temple of Eden” (courtesy of the artist)

A FUGUE OF VISUAL COUNTERPOINTS, Abol Bahadori’s mixed-media pictures are simultaneously mythical and realistic, technocratic and human, neoclassical and psychedelic, solid and wispy. “Hybrid Baroque,” The title of the Northern Virginia artist’s IA&A at Hillyer show, captures only some of those dualities.

It might seem that Bahadori’s artworks begin with their settings, precisely rendered architectural fantasies stuffed with arches, columns, and staircases. These stage sets appear to Greco-Roman in inspiration, and contribute to the pictures’s strong sense of depth. Within the appealingly anachronistic environs, the artist places bodies in motion -- crouching, curling, or perhaps flying. Several of the figures in this series sport a set of wings, whether angelic or insect-like. Other mythological references include the book of Genesis, whose tale of Eve, serpent, and apple is relocated to architecturally eclectic quarters in “Temple of Eden.”

Bahadori identifies as one of his precursors “Eastern miniatures,” by which he presumably means Persian and Mughal-period Indian book illustrations. Where those ornate pictures were rich with gold and other mineral hues, the artist’s work features artificial-looking modern colors, notably day-glo pinks and oranges. Bahadori’s fantastic collage-print-paintings draw from many cultures, their many elements ready to be unified by the glow of ultraviolet light.

Also at IA&A are shows by textile artist Esha Sadr and watercolorist Natasha Sachdeva. Sadr’s “Absence of Us” employs repurposed fabric, usually clumped on rectangular canvases, “to embody absence, fragility, and transformation,” according to her statement. On one wall is the D.C.-based weaver’s collaged reinterpretation of the U.S. flag, with yellow flowers substituting for stars. On the other is a large installation of hanging garments that frame a short video about the situation of women in her native Iran. Every piece of clothing could be a missing person.

The women in Natasha Sachdeva’s paintings are not nude, but there’s a lot of pink-brown flesh on display in her “will this entanglement ever resolve?” The New Delhi artist’s subjects, clad unglamorously in functional white underwear, contemplate their plus-sized bodies while often clutching small circular objects akin to the mirrors that hang in an adjacent installation. Sachdeva experienced sudden weight gain because of a specific medical condition, but most people, it seems, are self-conscious about their appearance. The show features a station where visitors can leave comments about bodies, and many have.

Clare Winslow, “Everything that Rises” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

IN THE WINDOW OF WASHINGTON PRINTMAKERS GALLERY, Clare Winslow has hung the remnants of two decades of printing, used objects the artist terms “an archive made visible.” The installation, “Through,” doesn’t relate exactly to Winslow’s show, “What Passes Between,” but there is a sense of suspended forms in the local artist’s images. Her screenprints array fabric-like matrices, whether grids or ribbons, over mottled grounds. Precise textures neatly contrast spacious expanses.

The selection features two large works, “Everything that Rises” and “Blue Hour Drift,” that combine printmaking with color-field painting. Patterned blocks and cascading strips appear to float over aqueous backdrops made with softly dappled acrylic paint. The illusion of depth is powerful, although Winslow achieves a similar effect in a series of painting-prints that are much smaller, and thus less immersive.

These eight extraordinary pictures, all extremely horizontal, subtly vary the vocabulary of the larger ones. Hard-edged geometric shapes, mostly circles but sometimes hexagons, skip across the compositions. Lace, loose weaves, and a twisting set of links join the serpentine ribbons, and a silhouetted blue bird flutters on a gray field. If “Through” displays the individual devices that underlie this work, these eight prints demonstrate how deftly Winslow can put things together.

Kirsty Little, “Gaia” (WOW 11)

APPROPRIATELY FOR A SHOP-WINDOW EXHIBITION, “WOW 11 -- We Are All Human” includes several works, such as Carol Rubin’s abstracted paintings, that can be read as crowd scenes. But the 19-artist show in the 5550 block of Wisconsin Avenue also features numerous images of solitariness. It is, of course, possible to be detached in a crowd, as seen in Susan L. Sanders’s black-and-white photographs of people alone in public spaces.

The show’s second photographer is Jeff Moscow, whose vignettes of everyday life -- also black-and-white -- date to the 1970s. This gives them a timeworn vibe akin to the feel of Bruce Abrams’s expressionist paintings of people in bars, many of them smoking. The boldly hued pictures look like things retrieved from a time capsule, although perhaps they were just inspired by Mad Men.

Other photo-derived pieces include an enigmatic Ann Stoddard video in which each quadrant of the screen is occupied by a silhouetted figure; Tom Greaves’s striking collages of girls and women, their visages shattered into shards and overlaid with aggressively doodled lines; and Adeoluwa Jones’s elegantly layered collages, one of which replaces a Black boy’s eyes with the Japanese characters for “namelessness,” inscribed in eye-catching orange.

Among the three-dimensional entries are David Prete’s almost-neoclassical busts, whose stately solidity is undermined by honeycombed sections; Esperanza Alzona’s cast-metal sculptures that distill humans to such body parts as a torso or a partial face gripped by a single hand; and Sharapat Kessler’s large multi-piece composition, which suggests a calligraphic gesture written in black shapes. Kirsty Little, who organizes these “WOW” (”windows on Wisconsin”) shows, offers a female figure defined with bent wires that bristle from a curving spine. This, too, is a solitary entity, but it’s titled “Gaia,” after the Greek goddess who personifies the Earth. She may stand alone, but she contains multitudes.

Geoff Desobry & Cristian Ianculescu: Untamed Spirits

Through March 28 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.

The Sketches: A Figure Drawing Exhibit

Through March 29 at Foundry Gallery, 2118 8th St. NW. foundrygallery.org. 202- 232-0203.

Abol Bahadori: Hybrid Baroque

Esha Sadr: Absence of Us

Natasha Sachdeva: will this entanglement ever resolve?

Through March 29 at IA&A at Hillyer 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Clare Winslow: What Passes Between

Through March 29 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

WOW 11 -- We Are All Human

Through April 4 at 5500-5510 Wisconsin Ave., Chevy Chase. Info: kirstylittle9@gmail.com.

Esperanza Alzona, “Complacency” (Washington Sculptors Group)

ONLY FOUR OF THE 27 PIECES in “Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice” are outdoors, but all the entries in this Washington Sculptors Group show offer some perspective on the world outside manmade culture. This is reflected both in the subject matter and the materials of the exhibition, which is mostly in Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. Many of the artworks are triumphs of recycling, whether the repurposed objects are the old instrument enclosure of Chris Combs’s tribute to Nevada’s near-extinct Pahrump poolfish or the colorful cardboard of “Octopus,” Joanathan Bessaci’s exuberant leap beyond his usual map-derived style.

The exemplary work is Esperanza Alzona’s “Complacency,” whose vision of a person almost contained by earth may be a little obvious conceptually, but is striking visually. Few of the pieces explicitly depict people, although a human torso lurks within Ira Tattelman’s found-object assemblage and small persons observe the black gush -- oil? -- at the center of Samuel Miller’s sculptural painting. Humanity is portrayed pungently, if less directly, in Sally Canzoneri’s paper model of D.C.’s main sewage pumping station, an ironic monument to civilization.

Among the elegantly stark offerings are Nicholas Femia’s steel “Legs,” which suggests a bodiless spider; Heidi Lippman’s formed-glass sculpture, charred to warn of global warming yet shimmeringly beautiful; Xiang Gu’s thicket of wooden stakes, which despite its denseness gives a pleasantly disorienting illusion of being weightless; and Miller’s “Funeral Urn for Planet Earth,” which conceals a twinkling night sky inside a giant ceramic vessel. Billy Friebele methodically arrays 3D prints of arrowheads to represent the erasure of local Native American culture, while David Whitmore conjures a sense of ancientness by contrasting mussel shells with fragments of industrial materials.

Joanathan Bessaci, “Octopus” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

Nature feeds on human detritus in Radhakund Ramnarine’s evocative sculptural collage, in which actual live plants grow from a spiral of deformed chairs. Birds flock to feeders in Marcie Wolf-Hubbard’s bas relief, made of paper mache and defined with charcoal and encaustic paint. In the context of this show, one of Jean Kim’s twisted-aluminum towers, sleekly machined, takes on an organic connotation.

Of the many entries that pit natural versus manufactured materials, the most urgent is McCleary Gallagher’s “Unsustainable”: A eight-foot-high metal spike impales a globe made of concentric wooden rings. As an environmental communique, this totem could hardly be more direct. Yet, like so many of the works in “Critical Ground,” it packs both complex resonance and visual grace.

At Glen Echo’s other galleries, Vicky Perry is showing photorealist floral paintings infiltrated by abstract touches, and Winston W. Harris is exhibiting color prints that often feature cutouts.

In her Stone Tower Gallery show, Perry foregrounds bright, precisely rendered blooms before complex, half-hidden backdrops. Flowers may dance across the sky in front of a massive waterfall, or rest next to a culture on which floral motifs are carved in stone. These playful juxtapositions are meant, according to the artist’s statement, to yield “a comprehensive unity.”

Harris’s prints, at Park View Gallery, are lively and colorful, with an art nouveau feel. Many of them are two-ply, with carved paper lattices mounted over the main image, but the most compelling depart the frame together. The artist’s set of twinned cutout horses, basically flat but bent to provide depth, is at once delicate and muscular.

Irene Pantelis, “Protective Sheath” (Studio Gallery)

AT FIRST GLANCE, IRENE PANTELIS’S STUDIO GALLERY SHOW looks anything but autobiographical. The inspiration for her “Bitter Bark” seems to be botanical, but the mixed-media paintings appear more concerned with color, form, and texture than with representation. Made on non-absorbent Yupo paper, the pictures revel in how the ink, watercolor, and natural dyes pool, meld, and drip. The plant-like compositions, with leafy growth at top and cross-hatched roots below, could just be a way of complementing the pigments’s spontaneous movement.

In fact, the series stems from Pantelis’s unearthing of a photograph of her late father’s hometown in Bolivia. The tree in the picture is a cinchona, whose bark -- yes, it’s bitter -- yields quinine. As a treatment for malaria, quinine was once crucial for European colonizers in tropical climes. Pantelis conceived these fluid paintings to express “the circulation of bodies, plants, and medicines across geographies,” notes the show’s wall text.

The plant dyes, derived from cinchona trees, combine with the other pigments in color schemes that are often heavy on green and black, but sometimes feature intense pinks. The shrub-like trees do sometimes bear pink or red flowers, vivid plumage captured by such pictures as “Jesuit’s Bank” (a term for cinchona that recalls its colonial heritage). Positioned on empty white grounds so they look a bit like miniature planets, Pantelis’s cinchona trees blossom with an abundance that seems both earthy and other-worldly.

Installation shot of Rob Pruitt’s “Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please” (Von Ammon Co.)

ROB PRUITT IS PROBABLY BEST-KNOWN for “Cocaine Buffet,” a 1998 installation that offered a nearly 16-foot-long line of real coke to gallery goers. Just three years later, the Maryland-native New Yorker began painting glittery pandas, inspired in part by childhood trips to the National Zoo. The charismatic Chinese mammals are still among Pruitt’s subjects, as is demonstrated by his Von Ammon Co. show, “Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please.” This title, if not purely ironic, is certainly equivocal.

With one exception, the 28 panda vignettes in this set are monochromatic, like the creatures themselves. Rendered with black-acrylic outlines on white paper, the pictures look more like prints than paintings. They all seem of a piece, but the compositions were generated by AI, which “has been fed the seminal works of various high-achievers of art history and contemporary art ... to be mutated crudely into Panda scenes,” according to the gallery’s essay. This provenance is not obvious from the results, which are quite similar in style.

Pandas, of course, are not really as cuddly as they appear. Yet Pruitt doesn’t give his animals a sense of menace, even though threatening demeanors are quite common in Von Ammon shows. In the most provocative picture, two pandas carry placards, as if involved in some sort of protest. But the signboards are blank, so the mammals’s stance is unclear. Are they MAGA? Antifa? Or commercial pitch-bears? That ambiguity is crucial. Pandas are almost universally beloved. But they don’t exist to make people happy, any more than any natural phenomena does.

Rick Ruggles, “Pending” (courtesy of the artist)

RICK RUGGLES CLEARLY LOVES METAL, so it’s no great surprise to learn that the photographer was “a metalsmith for many years,” according to the bio for his Artists & Makers exhibition. The pictures in “Focus Pocus: Macrophotography” include several views of voluptuously oxidized surfaces. One ruggedly lovely photo depicts rust-tinged yellow and orange drips etched on bluish metal, a visual essay on elegant deterioration. Even a closeup of a leaf is primarily in metallic yellow and brown hues, with just a tinge of green along the veins.

All the pictures in this selection are square, and some may have been made with a macro lens. But some clearly weren’t. Amid the tightly framed photos of tiny found patterns, mostly unrecognizable but pictorially irrefutable, are such playful non-macro vignettes as a street divided by a painted yellow line in which one segment, painted on a manhole cover, has become misaligned. The world Ruggles observes can appear perfect, or comically off-kilter.

Lest the photographer’s eye for beautifully battered colors completely upstage his compositional flair, the show includes five black-and-white pictures. Seemingly depicting the play of light on hair, “White Tornado” offers an epic contrast between shadow and illumination. It’s a reminder that Ruggles, like all photographers, is on a quest for immaculate light.

AT THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, Michèle Colburn is showing many of pigment-and-gunpowder pictures she recently exhibited at George Mason University’s Arlington campus. For a review of that show, see discerningeye.substack.com/p/a-forest-of-details

Washington Sculptors Group: Critical Ground: Art and Environmental Justice

Through March 22 at Popcorn Gallery and outdoors.

Vicky Perry: Secret Life of Flowers

Through March 22 at Stone Tower Gallery.

Winston W. Harris: New Everything, New

Through March 21 at Park View Gallery.

All at Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Irene Pantelis: Bitter Bark

Through March 21 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.

Rob Pruitt: Rob Wants to Make People Happy; He Aims to Please

Through March 23 at Von Ammon Co., 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

Rick Ruggles: Focus Pocus: Macrophotography

Through March 25 at Artists & Makers, 11810 Parklawn Dr., Rockville. artistsandmakersstudios.com. 240-437-9573.

Michèle Colburn

Through March 28 at the Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St. NW. artsclubofwashington.org. 202-331-7282.

William Kentridge, “Questa Importante Modificazione” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)

A VAGUELY HUMAN FIGURE MADE OF SCARLET SCRAPS centers “Questa Importante Modificazione,” a collage-print that’s one of the attention-getting pieces in William Kentridge’s “Vertical Thinking.” While that red is the only bright color in the Gallery Neptune & Brown show, luxuriant hues are hardly lacking in this selection of prints, drawings, and collages from 1993 to 2024. The veteran South African artist is a master of grays. Such prints as the three-panel “Medicine Chest” supply a rainbow of middle tones, seemingly layered like pencil marks.

Regular visitors to Neptune & Brown, which often exhibits Kentridge’s work, will recognize familiar motifs. The artist likes angular metal coffeepots so much that he sometimes substitutes them for people’s heads. (He also may streamline heads merely to gargantuan noses.) He’s long riffed on proto-Dadaist Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play, Ubu Roi, which flavors “Dada Picnic,” a parade of people whose figures demonstrate varying degrees of abstraction. His homeland’s fraught history is layered into the mix of “Landscape,” one of his many drawings executed on 1913 Rand Mines ledger sheets.

Although nearly all these pictures are black-and-white, their styles are diverse. Such hand-colored prints as “LULU (Portrait of a Lady Looking Down)” are high-contrast, softened by light-gray shadows. Much more detailed, “The General” is a stark lampoon of evil authority inspired both by early 20th-century European caricaturists and the brutality of apartheid’s enforcers. The solid black forms in “Chairs from Zeno II” are silhouetted like shadow puppets, while the ones in “Planes from Zeno II” are distant and suspended among wispy scratches. (”Zeno” is a reference to a play based on Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel, Confessions of Zeno.)

Kentridge’s pictures refer not only to theater but also to short animated films he’s made with such collaborators as Deborah Bell (one of whose large drawings is included in this show). But his prints and drawings are not subsidiary to his work in other media. They stand alone, exquisitely detailed and sumptuously monochromatic.

Milan Warner, “If I lay here long enough” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

REMNANTS OF FABRIC ARE RARELY VALUED, but in the case of “We Mend in the End Times” they represent things that are precious and even essential: human skin and physiques. The first hint of this is a slumped shape in one corner of D.C. Arts Center’s main gallery. Milan Warner’s “If I lay here long enough,” made of jute netting, suggests a body bag. It appears ready to be loaded into a Vietnam-era chopper or -- containing the live form of the future Count of Monte Christo -- tossed into the Mediterranean.

The show features the work of six artists, including curators Izy Carney and Lucas J Rougeux. The latter’s contributions are textile landscapes dotted with blood-like red circles. These speak to both political and domestic violence, evoking wounds as well as poppies -- symbols of sleep, peace, and remembrance of war victims. Rougeux’s ragged artworks also seem to express the artist’s personal vulnerability.

While most of the pieces don’t literally resemble bodies, several do invoke the human form. Among Fatima Janneh’s cyanotype-printed T-shirts are two that have been sewn together, implying Siamese twins or other, less corporeal types of symbiosis. Grace David’s “I Want My Body to Vibrate” is two large swoops of pieced-together black material, festooned with hundreds of safety pins and conjuring spiraling motion.

As might be expected, quilting is a motif. Eliza Clifford’s “Looking” is built of interlocking vertical and horizontal bands of wool and cotton, while Carney’s “Oscillation” uses a series of fabric panels to ponder the high-tech business of what the artist terms “AI-powered surveillance.” Fittingly, the show also offers fabric and tools so that visitors can contribute to a community quilt: Many hands can construct a common entity.

Mallory Kimmel, “Mobile Work Station I” (Hamiltonian Artists)

LAYERS OF IMAGES CONFLICT AND COMPLICATE within many of the pieces in “new. now. 26,” Hamiltonian Artworks’s annual showcase of its current fellows. Most of the five artists produce mixed-media work whose overlapping elements conjure flickers of meaning and shivers of alienation. Inkjet prints, photo transfers, and topographic maps are among the tiers overlaid by Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida, Chidinma Dureke, and Tara Youngborg.

Fuenzalida was born in California, but his multi-fabric, photo-printed artworks evoke the history and current situation of Chile, his ancestral homeland. One is aptly titled “Huellas (Traces).” Dureke’s photo-collages are highly personal meditations of her Nigerian-American heritage, but incorporate words and likenesses that are accessible to all viewers. Youngborg combines maps and other data into cyanotypes and a video that serve as symbolic landscapes of places as they exist today and are remembered.

No less complex but visually starker are Behrouz Vatankhah’s sculptural paintings, one of which is backlit by LEDs. The Tehran-born artist’s work is abstract, yet seeks to convey what a gallery note calls “personal experiences of anxiety, displacement, and cultural transition.” More directly autobiographical, and appealingly rueful, is Mallory Kimmel’s bound book of partly redacted rejection letters. The artist doesn’t think of herself only, though. “Mobile Work Station I,” a laptop mounted on an elliptical bicycle, is a sardonic monument to the Internet-age rat race.

Trisha Gupta, “Forest Haven Asylum” (VisArts)

A SHAMEFUL LEGACY OF NEGLECT is the difficult subject of Trisha Gupta’s “Haven,” an array of photos, drawings, and artifacts at VisArts. The D.C.-based Gupta, who describes herself as “a neurodivergent artist and medical professional,” has been investigating the buildings and grounds of Forest Haven Asylum, a defunct facility in suburban Maryland for people with intellectual disabilities. Notorious for physical and sexual abuse and hundreds of unexplained deaths, Forest Haven was closed by a judge’s order in 1991.

Gupta returned from her forays with both images and relics. A rusted basketball hoop presides over the show, mounted above sets of small artifacts embedded in resin, as if they were fossils preserved in amber. The artist made with drawings of the buildings and their environs on a 26-foot-long scroll, partially draped on the floor to make it suitably intrusive. A “Then and Now” installation overlaps two sets of photos: recent color views of abandoned rooms below earlier black-and-white pictures --- printed on transparent plastic -- of patients seemingly ignored by staff. (The source of the archival photos is not identified.)

“Haven” can experienced as a memorial to the victims of the bygone institution, nearly 400 of whom were buried in a mass grave. But the artist also means to sound a note of entirely contemporary caution. “Researching this asylum,” writes Gupta on her website, “is an effort to elucidate the continued damage of similar institutions today.”

Karin Edgett, “Spring Light Wave of Daffodil” (Ashe & Norton)

PRINTED DIGITALLY ON METALLIC PAPER OR METAL PLATES, ‘s macro photographs of flowers have a machine-like quality. The petals and pistils depicted in “Woke Botanicals” glisten like well-oiled mechanisms, and the silhouetted tendrils at the center of “Chicory Aura” even somewhat resemble electrical plugs. The closeup images, on display in Ashe & Norton’s small shop-window space, are also exercises in vivid color, almost unnatural in their boldness.

As the show’s title indicates, the artist sees her work differently. The pictures “reveal auras and fresh vibrations of energy and consciousness,” says her statement. Indeed, the text continues, the flowers embody “SuperConsciousness.” But perhaps either interpretation points to the same conclusion: that Edgett’s flowers are tiny clusters of power.

William Kentridge: Vertical Thinking

Through March 21 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.

We Mend in the End Times

Through March 13 at D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. dcartscenter.org. 202- 462-7833.

new. now. 26

Through March 14 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. hamiltonianartists.org. 202-332-1116.

Trisha Gupta: Haven

Through March 15 at Kaplan Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301-315-8200.

Karin Edgett: Woke Botanicals

Through March 16 at Ashe & Norton, 2440 Wisconsin Ave. NW, #A. ashe.norton@gmail.com.

Chris Combs, “ORB Pro” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

SOLIDITY AND EPHEMERALITY DOVETAIL, sometimes in the same piece, in “Continuum,” an impressive seven-artist sculpture invitational at the Athenaeum. Much of the work turns on juxtaposition, whether visual or conceptual, and many of the entries are whimsical. Several explore the nature of systems, or systems of nature. There are even a few nods to Dadaism and Surrealism.

Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle-wheel readymade inspired Roger Cutler’s “Ascending,” in which a similar wheel spins -- potentially -- at one end of a black-painted wooden structure that’s partly a staircase. To climb the stairs would be to move, symbolically, from the respective scale of subatomic particles to the entire universe, according to a gallery note.

In the venue’s basement are Seemeen Hashem’s sculptural mashups, often incorporating parts of musical instruments. These assemblages recall Surrealist author de Lautréamont’s description of something as “beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella” -- except that Hashem leaves little to chance. Her fabrications are neat and nearly symmetrical.

Valerie Theberge, Brian Kirk, and Jackie Hoysted all draw from the natural world, but with very different results. Theberge weaves wire into organic forms that she then covers with glass tiles, yielding elegant objects that appear soft and hard at the same time. Kirk, whose work is the most diverse, incorporates a shed snakeskin into an encaustic painting and constructs glass sculptures that, like Theberge’s, transfigure mutable natural shapes into hard-edged permanence. But Kirk also makes prints on paper with the rust of oxidized metal tools, memorializing industry rather than nature.

Newer technologies underlie Hoysted’s “Symbiotica II,” an immersive installation in a secluded, darkened gallery. An update of a work the artist presented four years ago at Glen Echo Park’s Stone Tower Gallery, the piece is inspired by mycelium, underground fungal networks that connect plants and trees. Such tendrils are represented by flickering generative patterns projected on three walls and pod-like lights networked on the floor. The latter turn from blue to yellow when a visitor inserts a finger into a pulse monitor, thus plugging humanity into its unseen, underappreciated environment.

Chris Combs’s “ORB Pro” is also interactive, but the system it evokes is anything but natural. With playful irony, the high-tech artist employs a large reflective chrome sphere and other metal parts to embody the virtual world of the Internet. A prattling female voice represents the web’s endless flow of distraction, which Combs has made interruptible by pressing a red button. Holding down that button temporarily switches the chatter to soothing natural sounds, but only after -- hilariously -- the voice has implored the netizen not to hush its monologue.

The show’s largest pieces are not the most literally substantial. Carl Johnson weaves steel wire with cotton and sends undulating ribbons of the hybrid material -- melding natural and industrial -- across the floor and up the walls. Making the most extravagant use of the Athenaeum’s high-ceilinged space, Johnson fills much of the room with diaphanous curves, towering yet ethereal. They illustrate just one of the ways that “Continuum” twists expectations for sculpture.

Tawny Chatmon, “Not Your Blackamoor” (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

TAWNY CHATMON’S EMBELLISHED PHOTOGRAPHS have always looked like museum pieces, so they hang most satisfyingly in several galleries of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Baltimore artist’s “Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies” offers examples of four series that present Black history and culture in the manner of Old Master paintings and Byzantine mosaics.

The photo-collagist’s style is deliberately sumptuous. Her staged and sometimes digitally manipulated photographic portraits intend to exalt their subjects, who are often children. Most of the added details are in gold, a color that symbolizes wealth, divinity, and -- in East Asian art -- enlightenment. Chatmon’s more recent pictures feature less ornamentation than the ones from 2018-2019’s “The Redemption” series. But “The Restoration,” an ongoing project, does incorporate such adornments as gilded oval 3D frames that encircle several individual women or girls.

Exquisitely but Puckishly, Chatmon uses the style of Dutch Golden Age portraits and still lifes to dignify such everyday foods as soft-serve ice cream and watermelon. The latter, of course, has connotations of racism, a scourge the artist addresses directly with pictures of children who hold Black racist memorabilia. These fraught items, some of which are actually on display, take the place of the symbols of power, prosperity, and devotion that feature in Renaissance European likenesses. As Chatmon seeks to uplift her Black subjects, she also highlights the history they have to overcome.

Rosemary Feit Covey, “Thanatopsis I and II” (Morton Fine Art)

PRINTMAKING IS EXCAVATED AND EXTRAPOLATED in the work of Rosemary Feit Covey, whose Morton Fine Art show is intricate and prolific. “Cutting Near the Edge” consists of just six pieces (one of them a diptych) but contains a good-sized forest’s worth of twigs, tendrils, and berry-like pips. Cataloging the ingredients of merely one of these engrossing, densely textured artworks would be a daunting task.

Feit Covey, born in South Africa and based in Northern Virginia, takes inspiration from “Thanatopsis,” an early-18th-century poem by Massachusetts author William Cullen Bryant. Most of the artist’s recent print-based sculptures are named for the poem, a contemplation of death whose thematic darkness is embodied by the pictures’s dominant palette. Only one of the works, the blood-hued “Touch Me If You Dare,” isn’t monopolized by black. But throughout the prints are bursts of color that suggest trace minerals embedded in gray stone or furtive blooms glimpsed deep in shadowed woods.

The artist must be compelled by such undergrowth, since she titled one piece “Lichens and Other Extraterrestrials.” Other works evoke more domestic materials: “Thanatopsis VI” suggests lace-work, and “Thanatopsis VII” fur and hair. The latter artwork, tangled with hanging thread, is the least tethered to a traditional picture frame. But none of these relief sculptures is a regular rectangle. Edges are ragged and torn, and found objects protrude every which way. Feit Covey may be thinking of death, yet “Cutting Near the Edge” doesn’t convey a sense of resignation. These sculptures swell with unruly life.

Mathew Curry, “Both Sides” (Addison/Ripley Fine Art)

DRIPS ARE ESSENTIAL TO “ALTARS,” Matthew Curry’s show at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, yet the D.C. artist’s work doesn’t recall Jackson Pollock’s. The spatters and blotches that characterize these mostly black-gray-and-white pictures seem more in the style of British gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman. And what are those white-painted steel discs whose crisply tooled forms, one per painting, set off the frantic gestures? They might be symbolic on-off buttons for cellphone-screen-shaped artworks that, the gallery notes, are inspired by “personal technology.” (One picture is titled “Swipe Left.”)

A veteran art director and graphic designer, Curry works across various disciplines. This show includes two video loops in which forms similar to those in the mixed-media paintings come to life, as well as a digital collage that’s the only full-color item. Black pigment from several of the pictures appears to trickle onto the adjacent wall, but the drips are actually printed on stick-on vinyl that can be neatly removed when the show concludes.

Despite such crafty tricks, Curry’s work is mainly handmade, and most of the pieces include improvised details that couldn’t be digitally generated. The pictures often feature low-relief black-on-black forms, some of which resemble fish or reptile scales. These marks, barely visible but intriguingly beckoning, demonstrate that there’s something more individual than personal technology: the trace of the human hand.

Eric Johnson, “RFK Stadium October 7, 2025” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

MOST PHOTOGRAPHS OFFER AT LEAST A HINT OF NARRATIVE, but the shows at Multiple Exposures often take a tricky approach to storytelling, spinning episodic tales based purely on visual affinities. That’s not the case with the gallery’s current exhibition, Eric Johnson’s “The Last Days of RFK Stadium.” Presented in strict chronological order, the D.C. photographer’s 22 black-and-white pictures document the 2025-26 disappearance of the structure that debuted in 1961 as D.C. Stadium.

The stark images can be seen as journalistic, tracing the process from the basically intact edifice on January 17, 2025 to an empty, snow-covered lot in the final frame 373 days later. Yet Johnson’s pictures evoke myriad places and things -- a modern Stonehenge under a black, full-moon night; the ribcage of a beached, largely decayed whale; and, almost finally, the ruin of an ancient city.

Viewers needn’t have any personal connection to the vanishing stadium to find some of these photos poignant. The increasingly desolate upright supports reach yearningly for the sky, which seems to expand as the building recedes. As Johnson watches, RFK shrinks from a sturdy, self-contained hulk to a spindly frame for the firmament above it.

THE SKY IS ALSO AMONG THE SUBJECTS of Photoworks’s “Dis/Orientation,” but Scott Davis’s black-and-white pictures, unlike Johnson’s, are not grounded. The billowing shapes lack an identifiable vantage point and thus are gently dizzying. Davis, also a D.C. photographer, was inspired by East Asian screen paintings and Alfred Steiglitz’s pioneering 1925-34 abstract cloud photos, according to a gallery note.

While Davis’s 10 cloud studies can appear vast, the exhibition’s other 35 pictures are tiny closeups that sit quietly inside wooden frames. Some of the objects depicted in the smaller photos are recognizable, if occasionally oriented in eccentric ways. But these pictures aren’t concerned with representation. Davis’s cups, bottles, and leaves may not look as cosmic as his clouds, but both sets of photos are exercises in light, shadow, and insubstantiality. Glimpsed through Davis’s lens, glass and metal become as airy as water vapor.

Continuum: An Athenaeum Sculpture Invitational

Through March 8 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Tawny Chatmon: Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies

Through March 8 at National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. nmwa.org. 202-783-5000.

Rosemary Feit Covey: Cutting Near the Edge

Through March 7 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. 202-628-2787. Open by appointment.

Matthew Curry: Altars

Through March 7 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Eric Johnson: The Last Days of RFK Stadium

Through March 8 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

Scott Davis: Dis/Orientation

Through March 7 at Photoworks, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd, Glen Echo. glenechophotoworks.org. 301-634-2274.

Reggie Gillumo, “Art of Meditation” (Zenith Gallery)

BLACK HISTORY IS MORE PRIMAL THAN INDIVIDUAL in Zenith Gallery’s 23-artist salute to Black History Month. There are renderings of notables from Black American history in the work of Ashley Joi, including a portrait of Frederick Douglass with 3D hair, made by the artist in collaboration with her teenage daughter. But these historical pictures also incorporate flowers, leaves, and vines that link them to Joi’s better-known paintings, fantastic visions in which people merge with plants.

That Black history is rooted in soil -- whether African or American -- is a principle also expressed by Chris Malone’s playful collage-sculpture, “Branching Out,” in which leaves emerge from a mythic creature’s sleeves and vines emerge from his head. An elemental connection between trees and humanity is always implicit in the sculptures of Bernie Houston, who somehow extracts people from pieces of found driftwood that he partly carves, then finishes with deep-hued paint.

Equally vegetal is “The Green Man,” one of two talismanic relief sculptures by Anne Bouie, whose head is wreathed by yellow-edged green leaves. “Green Man” and its engrossing companion piece, “The Dark Sacred Night” -- both tall enough to play in the NBA -- are imposing and mythic. The latter’s impassive face sits within a halo of black-painted clam shells, suggesting that Black identity was born from the sea as well as the earth.

More painting than sculpture, but still chunky with found objects, are Reggie Gillumo’s relief studies of single figures, whether meditating or making music. The artist employs metallic pigments that complement the many small steel objects encompassed by the thick pigment. Again, the pieces evoke a sense of emergence from a larger environment, becoming singular while retaining fundamental material.

Anyone who’s familiar with Zenith’s art-packed walls will understand that not all the work fits the themes discussed above. There’s more straightforward work in a variety of modes, from conventional portraits to decorative abstraction. But the idea of germination, whether physical or psychological, unites many of the strongest pieces.

Tim Davis, “Dedicated to ‘Q’ ‘‘ (courtesy of the artist)

ARTHUR ASHE, FELA KUTI, AND QUINCY JONES INSPIRED three of the collage-paintings in Tim Davis’s show at Fred Schnider Gallery of Art, but the pictures are not literal portraits. Most of the local artist’s recent work depicts multiple people in some sort of dialogue, which is why the exhibition is titled “Conversations.” A few of these interchanges are depicted at an art gallery such as International Visions, which Davis ran from 1997 in 2019 in Woodley Park.

The artist’s worldview is indeed international, and one of the pieces commemorates a trip to Malawi. As is typical of these pictures, the main image was rendered on clear acrylic, which permits layers of imagery and regions of transparency. The drawn and painted figures are usually faceless, distilled primarily to line and color. Behind them may be a map, a swirl of color, or the photographs that sit at the lower level of “The Memory of the Smiles of Africa,” the Malawi-recalling picture. The conversations Davis symbolically documents are among people and cultures, but also among contrasting visual elements.

Arleen Cheston, “Looking Beyond” (Watergate Gallery)

ACCORDING TO MANY OF THE 35 CONTRIBUTORS to Watergate Gallery’s current show, “Beyond the Horizon” is not a literal location. There are more than a few landscapes and several cityscapes in the wide-ranging selection, but also pure abstractions.

Of the lines that center compositions, some are wavering and drawn by nature itself, like the bisecting ribbon of sunlight in Julienne Clevenger’s elegantly chiaroscuro “Amelia Island Beach Sunset.” Intriguingly, two artists executed a similar idea but with very different results: Paul Cunningham’s “Twilight Sky, Provincetown” and Arleen Cheston’s “Looking Beyond” are both hard-edged stripe paintings on rolling canvases that hang softly to curl the geometric forms. But the former is vertical in pink and purple, while the latter is horizontal and defined by an expanse of unpainted linen.

The landscape itself is under threat in Anamario Hernandez’s precisely rendered “Global Warming,” in which nature blooms inside a central circle but cracked-earth desolation looms beyond it. Fabric-like patterns extend from people to their urban habitat in Helen Zughaib’s “Blue City,” packed with stripes and checkerboards that are flat yet conjure depth. Angela Iovino’s closeup painting of eggs and shells turns breakfast into a landscape, while Antonia Ramis Miguel partly abstracts boat sails into Cubist-style triangles.

Of the sculptures, the most striking is Alex Kasten’s “Opposing Curves,” two intersecting swoops of green-painted wood fixed in a sort of dance. With this piece, the visible horizon changes with the viewer’s vantage point. The same is true of Leslie Harris’s pigment and cold-wax painting, “A Remembrance of Things Past,” an all-over abstraction whose mottling of gold, green, and red shifts toward the last color at the bottom. There’s no “beyond” in this complex picture, just an near-infinite within.

Matina Marki Tillman, “Density,” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

JUST AS MOST PRINTS ARE MADE FROM MYRIAD SMALL LINES, many of the large pictures in Washington Printmakers Gallery’s “Big” consist of a series of images. The most intricate example of this is Deborah Schindler’s “Tic-Tac Tango X’s and O’s,” a black-and-white linocut in which 18 silhouetted couples dance inside one of those two letters. The composition is contrived with near-mathematical precision, while the sense of human motion is lively and playful. Even denser, but clumped rather than charted, are the dozens of people in Matina Marki Tillman’s also black-and-white “Density,” which depicts a Brueghel-like tumult.

Among the other suites of a sort are two floral arrangements: Nina Muys’s pretty “Life Force,” a three-plate print of various flowers, and Rosemary Cooley’s less naturalistic “Quattro Fiore,” executed in red and gray with touches of gold. From its aerial perspective, trees in fall colors look like flowers in Claire Wright’s photograph, “Firework,” which is bisected by a curving road that suggests a line drawn in the landscape.

Several of the multi-part pictures, all abstract, emphasize their individual components by pushing them into the third dimension. Ron Meick cut earth-toned prints into slices, fitted them on wooden slats, and overlapped the pieces in a jazzy jumble that reveals lots of white wall. Barbara Bitondo’s mostly black-and-white array of multiple prints and cyanotypes is suspended freely inside a glass-covered case. A photograph of a tree anchors Suzanne A. Bartlett’s multi-layered piece, which is overlaid with printed gauze.

There’s also a hint of a hanging banner in Kristine DeNinno’s scratchy-textured two-plate print of a red-and-yellow vertical panel on a gray-green field. The energy flows similarly, but horizontally, in Susan Wooddell Campbell’s monoprint, whose grainy colors are accented with colored pencil. Both pictures take their power less from size than from their swirling sense of movement.

Jun Lee, “100 Days of Prayer” (IA&A at Hillyer)

TWO ROOSTERS WHO PROCLAIM “FREE DC” are among the newer creatures in Jun Lee’s menagerie, as glimpsed in “Unbreakable Elements,” the local artist’s show at IA&A at Hillyer. A virtuoso of reduction woodcuts, Lee has shown her work at many local venues. Many of the images in this exhibition were seen at Artists & Makers about six months ago, although not necessarily in the form they assume here. Lee varies the menu by offering the original plywood masters of some prints, and by remaking a previously exhibited print -- depicting another rooster -- as a cast-glass sculpture.

For those who haven’t previously encountered Lee’s whimsical and impressively detailed work, this show is a fine introduction. It includes one of the printmaker’s best known prints, “Whisper and Wait,” in which a group of delicately haired rabbits contemplate a moon that appears as fuzzy as they are. Lee writes that her work depicts “competition in our society” and “the pressures of survival.” Yet her animals are so lovingly rendered that they seem to be enjoying charmed lives.

Plants rather beasts dominate Calliandra Marian Hermanson’s “of permutations and patterns,” on exhibit in the adjacent gallery. The Baltimore printmakers’s style is visually compatible with Lee’s, but her approach is more scientific. There are slides of microorganisms, a shelf of books, and a notebook for visitors to add suggestions. Riffing on the ways that botany and printmaking developed, sometimes in tandem, Hermanson splits simple outline pictures of plans across more than two dozen sheets of paper. However wildly nature grows, humans can’t resist fitting the results into an orderly grid.

Black History Month

Through Feb. 28 at Zenith Gallery, 1429 Iris St. NW. zenithgallery.com. -202- 783-2963.

Tim Davis: Conversations

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

Beyond the Horizon

Through March 7 at Watergate Gallery, 2552 Virginia Ave. NW. watergategalleryframedesign.com. 202-338-4488.

Big

Through March 1 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Jun Lee: Unbreakable Elements

Calliandra Marian Hermanson: of permutations and patterns

Through March 1 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Don Kimes, “Blue Falling” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

PHOTOGRAPHY OR VIDEO MERELY BEGAN the processes that produced the work in “PhotoGenesis 2,” an impressively diverse exhibition at the McLean Project for the Arts. Among the show’s 20 Washington-region artists, selected by curators Nancy Sausser and Jen Lillis, are just a few who don’t incorporate their photographic images into mixed-media work. And even those contributors denature or deconstruct their source material in provocative ways.

Chris Combs fragments video of nature in two high-tech pieces, notably “S(p)lash,” a skinny and obliquely mounted LED panel that displays assorted views of swelling water. The same subject gets a starker treatment in a work by David Carlson (better known as an abstract painter). His “Messages” is a high-contrast black-and-white closeup of the Connecticut River, distilled to white ripples inside a black circle.

A similar format frames a much more intricate image in Don Kimes’s exquisite “Blue Falling,” a mixed-media oval picture. This richly layered, predominantly blue piece appears to overlay images of the natural and built worlds, glimmering with reflected pink and white light. There may be a house within the artwork’s depths, linking it to David Douglas’s atmospheric treated photo of a large American home, glimpsed through a painterly haze of hue and mist.

The videos include Maryam Rassapour’s pair of short animated collages and Dawn Whitmore’s study of dancing figures distorted so that they often have two sets of feet. The effect is as eerie as it is graceful.

Several participants, including Joseph Cortina and Sarah Salomon, carve photographs into shards and reassemble them as striking sculptures. Linda Plaisted’s elegant photo-collages are pierced with holes, embellished with gold leaf, and cloistered inside black boxes. Alexandra Silverthorne does subtler damage to her photos of forested scenes in New Orleans and D.C.; she soaks them in water from the local river to warp them gently.

Zofie King is also a collagist, but cyanotypes of architectural interiors are minor elements in her beautifully drawn and painted supernatural visions. Like Catherine Day, who prints her photographic closeups on antique fabric, King transforms real-world images into something beguilingly unattainable.

Lindsay Mueller, “Drawing Debris” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

FEW DIRECT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS OF PHOTOGRAPHY occur in “Why Paint? II,” a 12-artist show at Washington Studio School. But some influence is evident, notably among the contributors who offer multiple views of the same person or scene. They jump-cut reality as if their paintbrushes were equipped with motor drives.

Marina Ross, who sometimes works from stills from The Wizard of Oz, channels personal grief into a series of yellow-heavy oils of a woman’s face. Scott Hutchison painted 26 small closeups of a shirtless man’s head and shoulders, each apparently from a different vantage. (Only six are on display; the others are supposed to be visible on a video screen that was not in operation during my visit.) Olivia Isabel Rosato, who is also a photographer, painted the same underpass twice, alternately in light or darkness.

The exhibition, curated by Reem Bassous and Jan Dickey, features artists from Chicago and New York City as well as D.C. The last group consists of Hutchison, traditionalist-futurist Elaine Qiu, expressionist Eric Uhlir, and nature artist Lindsay Mueller, whose intimate landscapes are made on chunky, rough-edged slabs of paper and paper clay, Mueller’s sculptural style is akin to that of Xiaohan Jiang, whose “Shared Smoke” is painted on felt that swirls up and away from the panel on which it’s mounted.

Jiang’s picture is one of the looser ones in an array that’s all, arguably, representational. (Noelle Africh’s black-on-black “Face Value” is hard to read, but its title hints that it depicts a human visage.) The diverse selection includes Baoying Huang’s deadpan-realist still life of a potted plant and two renderings of scenes that appear unstable. Anna Gregor’s “After Botticelli V” might portray a painter’s studio, but the image is slippery and intriguingly tentative. A similar vibe characterizes Qiu’s black-and-white “Hindsight #12,” which suggests an interior space. Both are the work of artists who discover their subjects as much with the hand as the eye.

Dorothy Fratt, “Gulf of California” (detail) (PFA Gallery)

THE TITLE OF PFA GALLERY’S SECOND DOROTHY FRATT SHOW is accurate so far as it goes. Bold reds and cool greens are among the principal attractions of “Explorations of Color,” a selection of acrylic paintings on paper made between 1973 and 2001. But Fratt (1923-2017) was equally concerned with form, carefully placing blocks, bars, and other simple shapes mostly on monochromatic fields. The artist’s pictures can resemble streamlined landscapes, an affinity she acknowledged with scenic titles such as “Gulf of California” and “Quiet Estuary.”

A native Washingtonian, Fratt began her art career in her hometown, but relocated to Arizona in 1958, just as D.C’s Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were establishing themselves as color field painters. Her style developed differently, with more sense of solidity and without the white space common in the paintings of her almost-peers back in Washington. Fratt’s pictures are usually characterized by a dominant hue that holds together elements in various colors, only some of which provide strong tonal opposition.

This show’s paintings include “Blue Jacob’s Ladder,” which fixes a vivid orange rectangle -- centered between purple and green ones -- in an expanse of contrasting blue. Equally striking is “Three Visitors,” which positions bars of purple and two shades inside a black box that’s floated above a pale-blue field in a manner that suggests Mark Rothko’s compositions.

The selection also includes seven pictures (six of them studies) in which the primary dialogue is between close shades of red: Scarlet backdrops diverge only slightly in hue from a rock-like slab or a jagged squiggle that hints at a mountain range. It’s possible to see these artworks as distilled scenes of desert sunsets, or just as formal experiments. Either way, the imagery is as delicate as the colors are forceful.

Tinam Valk, “Women in a Field” (Portico Gallery)

DEPTH IS LITERAL AS WELL AS METAPHORICAL in Tinam Valk’s paintings, which are made on craggy surfaces built up with soil, leaves, modeling paste, and underpainting. Her imagery is based partly on old photographs, hinting at personal memories, but is executed with reverie-evoking softness and features surreal touches. The absurdist elements are mostly related to animals in “Figures & More,” the suburban Maryland artist’s show of recent work at Portico Gallery at Studio 3807.

Valk grew up in Europe, and the people in her pictures often look as if they’ve been summoned from that continent a few generations ago. Among the most traditional of the paintings is “Women in a Field,” whose trio of rustics and impressionistic style conjure a late-19th-century feel. Yet many of the pictures incorporate African or Asian fauna, sometimes as the principal focus. A tiger lurks behind a man in vintage suit in “Tempo Dulu II,” and a gorilla wearing a baby bonnet sits across a stream -- water often features in Valk’s compositions -- from a woman in an old-timey dress in “The Dream.” Several pictures foreground animals, and a few banish humans altogether.

Do these furry or feathered creatures represent danger to the nearby people? Or are they objects of fascination and even emulation? The artist suggests the latter by including paintings of mummers -- costumed paraders -- who wear animal-head masks. Donning a rabbit’s head or a deer’s antlers is a way of escaping the ordinariness of human existence, and perhaps of acquiring a sort of instinctual wisdom. In Valk’s gently hallucinatory pictures, the mummers aren’t merely experiencing a dream. They, like the artist herself, are willing themselves into a fantastical state.

“Tiger and Magpie” (unidentified artist) (Korean Cultural Center)

THE LINK BETWEEN EAST ASIAN ART AND AMERICAN CARTOONS is only about a century old, but a loose affinity can be traced at least to the 18th century. That’s when the earliest pieces in “Charm of Seoul, Minwha: Wishes in Korean Folk Painting” were made. Elegant, centuries-old renderings of tigers, fish, and other animals are among the highlights of this Korean Cultural Center show. But nearby are playful works that reference U.S. cartoons and comic books, as well as a room-filling CGI forest scene centered on a stylized waterfall and populated by silhouetted creatures of land and sky.

One gallery holds mostly older works in the minhwa style, including delicate porcelain flasks and a painting of a scholar’s cabinet that recalls the one that introduced the National Museum of Asian Art’s “Korean Treasures” exhibition (which closed Feb. 1). A recurring character is a tiger whose sinuous form dominates a vertical painting, and is often accompanied by a magpie. (The significance of this pairing reportedly changed over time.) But this room also holds a video animation of a four-part screen painting, combining traditional and contemporary formats.

More technological fun awaits in the third gallery, where placing one of four vases on one of three stands activates an animation of a blossoming plant. Most of the room’s other works are recent paintings by artists who graft American icons onto Korean motifs. A series by KyungJu Kim pairs cute animals with superhero symbols, so that a cute baby tiger perches next to Iron Man’s helmet. Somi Moon makes pop-art updates of pictures of shrines and scholarly libraries, in the process introducing such cultural interlopers as Tom and Jerry. If the cat and mouse are not exactly a tiger and a magpie, they embody a similarly irreverent spirit.

PhotoGenesis 2

Through Feb. 24 at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Ave., McLean. mpaart.org. 703-790-1953.

Why Paint? II

Through Feb. 27 at Washington Studio School, 2129 S St. NW. washingtonstudioschool.org. 202-234-3030.

Dorothy Fratt: Explorations in Color

Through Feb. 28 at PFA Gallery, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

Tinam Valk: Figures & More

Through Feb. 28 at Portico Gallery at Studio 3807, 3807 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. portico3807.com. 202-487-8458.

Charm of Seoul, Minhwa: Wishes in Korean Folk Painting

Through Feb. 20 at the Korean Cultural Center, 2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW. washingtondc.korean-culture.org/en. 202-939-5688.

Marsha Goldberg, “Campo XLV” (Adah Rose Gallery)

THE WORLD IS SOFT, STILL, AND A LITTLE BLURRY in the paintings of Nathan Mullins and Marsha Goldberg, currently co-billed in Adah Rose Gallery’s “A Small Moment of Amazement.” Mullins is a representational but impressionistic oil painter whose recent works include numerous still lifes of books grouped by topic or author. His other pictures, all small and hushed, depict domestic scenes populated by cats and women who are reading, sleeping, or talking.

The last is the occasion for one of the Mississippi artist’s gentle formal experiments: four paintings of the same pair of conversationalists at the same small-town location, but at different times of day. The quartet demonstrates Mullins’s careful rendering of light and shadow, but also his bent for distilling real-world objects to their geometric fundamentals. Buildings and books become rectangles, simple and direct yet far from hard-edged in the artist’s cottony style.

Disruptive events, when they occur, are merely suggested. “Sunburn” ponders the partly red back of a partly naked woman, whose discomfort is apparently not severe: a cat curls up on her covered legs. The artist also offers a diptych that is, playfully, vertical rather than horizontal. The action, such as it is, of “K Revises the Novel” is wholly in the lower panel; above are just shelves, plants, and the top of a lamp-shade. The top half reveals the part of Mullins’s domain that is nothing but color and shape.

That’s where Mullins’s approach overlaps that of Goldberg, whose pictures are purely abstract but equally attuned to illumination and elemental form. The New Jersey artist paints fields of closely abutting dots whose colors are complexly layered and edges are softly defined. She applies acrylic ink on synthetic Yupo paper, whose non-absorbent surface allows the pigment to pool and meld. The small circles are positioned regularly, but rendered freehand and with several coats in different but complementary hues. The process yields dots that appear to glisten and twinkle, and sometimes seemingly to undulate across the compositions.

The artist’s recent works include several in the “Campo” series, inspired by the light of Venice. (”Campo” is Italian for “field,” and is also applied to urban squares.) These are rectangular and covered with dots that subtly shift color. Other paintings use blocs of small, similarly-hued circles to define two or more eccentric shapes that are placed in opposition to each other. The sense of contrast and motion is stronger in these pictures, but all of them pulse and glimmer. The multiple levels of color in each dot generate a force that crackles outward, energizing the entire field.

Pat Goslee, “Sensing Rain” (Popcorn Gallery)

PAT GOSLEE IS AN ABSTRACTIONIST, but she sometimes incorporates recognizable images into her richly tangled paintings. Those visual allusions have changed over time, and so have the prevailing color schemes. Or at least that’s the case with the recent pictures in “As Syllable from Sound,” the D.C. artist’s show at Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. The representational glimmers, which in the past could suggest viscera, are currently trending toward the floral. And many of these paintings are keyed to the contrast between pinks and greens, hues that suggest gardens.

Little if any of this is intentional, according to the artist’s statement. She constructs her dense compositions “instinctively,” she writes, “placing pattern atop pattern.” There’s a liquid quality to some of these pictures -- one includes a spilled-coffee stain -- that occasionally recalls Maggie Michael’s sloshed-color style. But there are also repeated decorative elements produced by stenciling, which yields small squares, ribbon-like vertical lines, and lacy filigree. The last may be the result of actual lace, since Goslee employs secondhand fabrics as one of her form-generating devices. A sense of remaking or reclaiming animates these pictures, some of which are on canvases made from recycled plastic bottles.

The show’s centerpiece is a large triptych whose soft shapes and blurry gestures coalesce into something epic. Tellingly, the painting is called “Muscle Memory.” That title suggests that the act of making such an artwork -- layering, constructing, establishing rhythms of soft and hard, free and stenciled -- is what defines it. The artist herself may ultimately see rain, flowers, and other phenomena in the finished picture. But serendipity, not overall design, is what summons such associations.

Beverly Logan, “Blank Building” (Studio Gallery)

THE SIMPLEST OF BUILDINGS BECOME PORTALS into alternate universes in Beverly Logan’s photo-collages, each centered on a house, barn, or elementary industrial structure. These everyday edifices give a sense of ordinariness to the pictures in “Everything Is in Order,” the local artist’s Studio Gallery show. But Logan gently subverts her collages’s naturalism with bright colors and unexpected details. Not everything is orderly in pictures that place buildings in water, towering over roads, or floating in a cloud bank.

Logan takes a newly streamlined approach in this show, curated by Adah Rose Gallery’s namesake, Adah Rose Bitterbaum. Most of the imagery appears commonplace, and the transformations are often executed simply with color shifts. In “Greenhouse,” the title structure seems to be siphoning its strong hue from the adjacent grass, which has turned orange as a result. Red or orange buildings clash vibrantly with electric-blue skies, and puffy white clouds bid to shroud everything. Indeed, “White House with Window” appears to have been rendered as flat as a sheet of paper, to serve as a stage set for the blue-and-white firmament behind, around, and within it. Solid as they may seem, the structures in Logan’s alchemical collages are no more substantial than water vapor.

“Suicide printing” is the attention-getting term Andrea Kraus uses to describe the process by which she made the linocuts in “Layer Perfect,” also at Studio (and also curated by Bitterbaum). More commonly termed “reduction printing,” the technique involves applying one color of ink and then recarving the same matrix for each subsequent impression. (This is “suicide” because the earlier versions of the block can’t be brought back to life.) The local artist uses the strategy to produce pictures in which vivid and evocatively smeary colors are contained, sometimes just barely, by bold black forms.

These prints mostly explore Asian motifs, usually in tight closeups that banish the wider world. Parasols, marionettes, and swimming koi are presented from an immersive, nose-against-the-glass perspective. Sometimes Kraus takes a few steps back, notably for two fanciful pictures in which a woman defies real-world scale by reclining under a bonsai tree. This figure can be seen as a stand-in for the spectator. She’s been allowed to infiltrate an emblematic Asian scene, much the way Kraus invites the viewer’s eye to enter her iconic vignettes.

Nathan Mullins & Marsha Goldberg: A Small Moment of Amazement

Through Feb. 20 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington. adahrosegallery.com. (301) 922-0162.

Pat Goslee: As Syllable from Sound

Through Feb. 15 at Popcorn Gallery, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Beverly Logan: Everything Is in Order

Andrea Kraus: Layer Perfect

Through Feb. 21 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202- 232-8734

Mark Leithauser, “Horological Fascination” (Art Gallery at Stanford in Washington)

THE WORK OF A METICULOUS MAXIMALIST, the artworks of “The Evolving Image: The Complete Prints of Mark Leithauser” were made mostly in the 1970s. Long a virtuoso exhibition designer at the National Gallery of Art, Leithauser made black-and-white prints -- mostly etchings and engravings -- in his spare time. He shifted to “the relatively less stressful art of oil painting” in the mid-1980s, according to the extensive catalogue essay by curator Eric Denker. Thus the show’s complete account of Leithauser’s prints encompasses just 23 works, supplemented by a few drawings and an oil painting of “Birches,” subject also rendered separately as a print and a pencil drawing.

The artist is a Michigan native who spent childhood summers in the state’s heavily wooded north. This inspired his most captivating prints, immersive views of dense, fecund forests. Such etchings and engravings as “Migration” and “Northern Shore” are phenomenally detailed and endowed with a powerful sense of depth. Some sort of path, visual if not physical, leads the eye deep into landscapes constructed as much of shadows as trees.

Leithauser also produced tidier but no less intricate pictures of contained nature, whether framed by a window in “Alternate Landscape” or flourishing under glass “In the North Greenhouse.” (The latter depicts a National Gallery facility.) Vegetation takes on human qualities in two lithographs, “Weed Study” and “Nibelung Series: Alberich and Mime.” The two names are those of dwarves from German lore and Wagnerian opera, and a gnome lurks behind the picture’s single tree, which itself looks a bit like a person with arm-like branches.

Fairy-tale creatures abound in the artist’s early prints, which Denker notes are influenced by 19th- and early-20th-century British artists Arthur Rackham (who illustrated one of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan works) and Richard Dadd. Such beings are reamde as toys in the Dürer-influenced “Horological Fascination,” a two-panel depiction of a clockmaker at work in an atelier that is, of course, packed with objects -- and is also a room with a view.

His northern-forest prints show the artist at the peak of his talents, but putting “Horological Fascination” on the catalogue’s cover makes sense. It’s not only a fine example of Leithauser’s skills and interests, but also something of a self-portrait. It shows the exacting craftsmen, alone and engrossed, as he constructs an entire world in an enclosed space.

Michèle Colburn, “Remembrance (No. 2)” (Founders Gallery, George Mason University)

VIOLENCE IS ACKNOWLEDGED BUT SYMBOLICALLY OVERCOME in Michèle Colburn’s mixed-media paintings, 10 of which are on exhibit at Founders Gallery at George Mason University’s Arlington campus. All the pictures in “Material Acts of Resistance” are bomb-disposal exercises of a sort. The D.C. artist begins with what her statement terms “inert gunpowder residues,” the remains of a substance she employs “for its associations, but also for its tonal qualities.” Then she layers watercolor and diluted acrylics atop the faint, grainy grays.

The pigments are poured in a manner that intentionally recalls mid-20th-century Washington colorists. On occasion, the soft, fluid hues are overlaid with paint that’s applied more systematically. Three of the most recent artworks include representational imagery of flowers and plants, sometimes with explicit metaphorical meaning. Most specific is “Remembrance (No. 2),” whose red poppies echo those used to commemorate the war dead in the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth countries. But all these pictures are keyed to real-world events, even when that’s revealed only by their titles and the artist’s accompanying notes.

“Lawyers, Guns, and Money” was inspired by the many lawsuits filed against Trump and his administration (and the Warren Zevon song, of course). “These Times” invokes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by splashing the blue and yellow of the latter’s flag. Other pieces were sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic and a visit to post-war Vietnam, which Colburn represents as intensely green.

That color also dominates “Emergence,” in which puffs of spent explosive frame leaves, branches, and a small bunch of hanging olives. The title could refer to how the organic forms manifest within the metallic-hued clouds, or just to the way that green materializes amid gray. In either case, the new flowering overwhelms the old strife.

Veronica Barker-Barzel, “Looking for a ‘Home’ “ (Touchstone Gallery)

HYBRIDS IN BOTH CONTENT AND MEDIA, the artworks in Veronica Barker-Barzel’s “Chimeric Cartography” combine disparate elements into images that are indeed chimerical. The paintings, prints, and sculptures in this Touchstone Gallery exhibition imagine a bestiary that combines aspects of cats and rabbits, birds and butterflies. (There’s also an invasive lantern fly with a human head.) These fantastical creatures dwell in worlds that are partly naturalistic yet largely geometric. Tessellated patterns that resemble honeycombs and tiled mosaics provide the backdrops to many of the local artist’s prints and mixed-media paintings.

Some of Barker-Barzel’s relief prints, which look like woodblocks, stand alone. They’re also incorporated into paintings, sometimes repeated in rows to make borders for larger images. Collage is also key to the show’s three sculptures, which are partial mannequin-like figures covered in scraps of paper. The most literally cartographic of these is “Totem,” a pair of upside-down legs embellished with segments of maps. It’s a monument to uncharted realms.

If such pieces are a bit disorienting, they’re far from menacing. The artist’s inspirations include European fairy tales, yet sidestep the darkness of that tradition. Barker-Barzel’s visions may be strange, but they feel fundamentally benign.

In Mary D. Ott’s prints and paintings, the tighter the focus, the more striking the image. The works in the local artist’s “RetroSpective,” also at Touchstone, include a painting of an abstracted landscape and a single cityscape, a photo-derived print of Prague overlaid with vertical of yellow and light green. But the standouts are closeups of grass that showcase the artist’s technique and superb sense of design.

Ott takes two different approaches to grass. Some of her pictures are near-abstract paintings whose undulating upright lines are made by applying pigment with strands of yarn. Others are starkly elegant prints of “bouquets” that employ dried grasses as the actual matrices. The latter artworks are made with vividly unnatural hues, sometimes metallic, and striking contrasts of color and form. Perhaps most effective is “Grass Bouquet VI,” which overlays precise renderings of black fronds with softer shapes in reddish brown. The imagery is entirely from nature, but the mastery is purely human.

“Flowers for Jeff,” James Phillips, (Hemphill Artworks)

AFRICAN TALISMANS SECRETED IN QUILT-LIKE DESIGNS characterize James Phillips’s paintings, 20 of which are now at Hemphill Artworks. “The Pattern Plays the Mind” surveys three decades in the career of the Black artist, who lives in Baltimore and teaches at Howard University. Among the most vivid pieces are banner-like paintings on canvas such as 1994’s “Just/Us,” the show’s earliest entry. But the majority of the works are painted on board and partly cut out, so that expanses of white space contrast the intricate arrangements of fabric-like motifs.

Rhythm is essential to these brightly hued pictures, whose layouts are systematic and often symmetrical. Unexpected elements sometimes disrupt the order, giving the compositions a jazziness that’s clearly as important as their methodical nature. (A few of Phillips’s titles invoke such jazz musicians as trumpeter Don Cherry and guitarist Sonny Sharrock.) The circular cut-out paintings, notably “Boomerang II” and “Jackknife I,” can be seen as riffs, spinning in place like an ostinato.

While color, pattern, and a sense of movement dominate these pictures, the occasional allusions to African folk art are especially potent. The outlined figures in 2003’s “Celestial Couple” look like traditional West African sculptures, and similar forms appear in several other paintings. Phillips’s recent work tends to be simpler and more regular, as if distilled from his earlier style. Yet a pair of sculpture-like entities are at the center of one of the most recent paintings, 2025’s “Meditating on the Red I, No. 1.” References to Phillips’s heritage may not always appear in his work, but Africa is always present.

The Evolving Image: The Complete Prints of Mark Leithauser

Through Feb. 15 at the Art Gallery at Stanford in Washington, 2655 Connecticut Ave. NW. siw.stanford.edu/art-gallery/art-gallery-stanford-washington. 202-803-8100.

Michèle Colburn: Material Acts of Resistance

Through Feb. 6 at Founders Gallery at Mason Square, George Mason University, 3351 Fairfax Dr., Arlington. masonexhibitions.org/exhibitions/materialactsofresistance

Veronica Barker-Barzel: Chimeric Cartography

Mary D. Ott: RetroSpective

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

James Phillips: The Pattern Plays the Mind

Through Feb. 7 at Hemphill Artworks, 434 K St. NW. hemphillfinearts.com. 202- 234-5601.