Pamela Thompson, “Through the Heart” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

MANY SUBSTANCES OTHER THAN TRADITIONAL PIGMENT, as the show’s title suggests, were used to make the pieces in “(Not) Strictly Painting 15.” But the most striking elements employed by the 48 artists selected by juror Michael O’Sullivan were gathered from nature. Soil, silk, beeswax, and an actual hornet’s nest compete for attention with manmade ingredients

For viewers who don’t frequent local galleries, the exhibition offers an overview of nearly a dozen much-exhibited local artists and their trademark styles. Carol Barsha paints large, colorful, and slightly exaggerated garden scenes. Michèle Colburn also renders floral arrangements, but more abstractly and mingled provocatively with gunpowder residue. Mira Hecht overlaps circles in luminous arrangements, although usually more colorfully than in the almost-white picture here. Leslie Holt contrasts stained colors with pointed text stitched into the canvas. Susan R. Johnson ponders women’s historical roles with juxtaposed images appropriated from mid-20th-century fashion publications.

The inventory continues: Chee Keong Kung combines painting and drawing to make pictures in which hard-edged geometric shapes appear to explode from the center. Laurel Lukaszewski sculpts graceful porcelain figures, often of animals such as the blue-and-white rabbit head displayed here. Sean Riley contains richly mottled color fields within elemental forms such as the lozenge in this show’s picture. Tinam Valk paints humans amid nature in a softly impressionist manner.

Several entries are indeed paintings, but rarely in Valk’s representational mode. Tom Hill’s dynamic triptych pits blue drips versus red ones, both pigments shiny and thickly applied. The picture’s material heaviness is a neat contrast to the watery delicacy of Lisa Sheirer’s abstraction, which hints at landscape.

Some pictures spiral outward, like Jenny Walton’s “Wildfire,” an artist’s book that seems to show the progress of an abstracted blaze. Others burrow inward, like a Koda Smith painting that’s only partly visible through holes in an aluminum plate fixed above it. Marc Robarge offers a green field from which a porcelain piece, its form seemingly organic, protrudes. Leah Lewis’s picture of crabs, the show’s most realistic painting, is overlaid enigmatically with large 3D flowers.

The blooms aren’t real, but the circles in Elsabé Dixon’s collage-painting are actual wax, and the silk to which they adhere is worm-spun. Also genuine is the hornet’s nest in Brian Slagle’s painting-like piece, which smears the insect-made material across the canvas as if it were, well, paint. Soil is an element in Pamela Thompson’s compellingly craggy wall sculpture, made largely of heat-carved foam. Its center is worn away, offering a rough portal into the natural world, or to a place that is perhaps beyond the reach of painting as it was once known.

Betsy Packard, “.1441” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE ARTISTS FEATURED IN “(NOT) STRICTLY PAINTING” include Betsy Packard, who cagily repurposes found materials in an expression of what she terms “anti-consumerism.” Examples of the sort of textile collage she’s showing in McLean can also be found in her show at the Writer’s Center, but the most appropriate pieces are those that incorporate -- or obliterate -- text.

Made between 1978 and today, the artworks are intentionally ragged and conceptually open-ended. They’re given purely numerical tiles, presumably to banish metaphorical implications. Sometimes Packard cuts or pulps books, as if to undermine the power of the printed word. One assemblage places a single word, “mendacious,” within a waxy red circle on a framed scrap of fabric; another is a set of 16 handwritten notes from the early 1960s, all stitched together in a sort of artist’s anti-book.

Among the most sculptural items is a miniature bench, reminiscent of a church pew, that’s entirely inscribed with cursive text; and a streamlined white head inscribed with black writing. Both ask to be read, and yet are largely illegible. In Packard’s text-oriented art, language appears to be just another found object, more physical than cerebral.

Xiang Gu, “The Full Moon” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

SCULPTURE DEFINES SPACE AND SPACE DEFINES SCULPTURE in the 10th annual installment of “Artina,” a showcase for the Washington Sculptors Group at Sandy Spring Museum. Subtitled “Ripples of 10 Years,” the outdoor exhibition offers work by 17 artists, juried by local art consultant Maria Gabriela (“Gaby”) Mizes.

The most conspicuous entry is Sarah Jane Rodman’s “The Wave,” an elegant fabric installation on the pergola that leads to the museum’s from door. It consists of two-ply diaphanous fabric panels whose colors cascade from white to blue to purple, and which are activated by the wind much as tides are impelled by the moon. Nearby is another fabric piece, Sally Canzoneri’s similarly themed “Light Water Wind.” Its five hanging banners are printed with photographs of windows of distinctive buildings, notably DC Water’s symbolically wave-shaped headquarters.

Also dangling or draped are the painted-paper tendrils of Sanzi Kermes’s “R&R,” which colonize three trees. Carolina Mayorga’s “Order Disruption” is another set of banners, but these hug the grass and are in the artist’s trademark pink. While Barbara Ziselberger’s delicately honeycombed “I Remember When” incorporates small glass shards, it’s primarily handmade paper.

Other pieces employ more substantial materials. Frederic Crist’s “Shop Note #8, aluminum” is an upright, floral-looking abstraction rendered in shiny metal. Esperanza Alzona’s “Steps” places two cast-iron feet upon a seemingly fluffy polystyrene cloud. Eugene Provenzo’s “Hegel’s Dialectic” embodies the philosophical concept in steel, with two glistening spheres partially implanted in a matte-finish cylinder. Addison Likins’s “Check Marks the Spot” is a giant check mark, playfully affirmative, made of painted plastic board. Daniel Shay’s spindly tower is made of bamboo, yet is transformed into a pop-culture object by its orange coating. One of the few figurative objects, Anna Kekesi-Kim’s “Daphne” is a woman constructed principally of driftwood, but with a face and one hand made of ceramic.

Jean Jinho Kim uses her standard powder-coated aluminum, but in an unusual form and hue. The piece is mostly black, resting on two day-glo orange “hoofs” and oriented horizontally rather vertically, which is more typical of her style. The bent metal has 10 joints, one for each year of Artina, and is positioned upon an upward-facing mirror that reflects the sky as well as the eccentrically industrial sculpture itself.

As it happens, there’s a lot of the reflective material in this array. Tatyana Shramko’s “Walden Pond” takes the form of a mirror, also pointed toward the heavens. Raina Hatcher’s “To Touch the Sky” outlines a human figure with small round mirrors placed in the ground. Billy Friebele’s tribute to the horseshoe crab, “450-year-old Reflections,” is made of wood but embedded with 10 shining steel balls to represent the animals’s 10 photo-receptors.

Mixed-media sculptures by Hijo Nam and Xiang Gu are partly metal, yet composed mostly of air. Nam’s “Freedom from Avarice” is a gourd-shaped 3D grid whose vertical wires are raw steel and whose horizontal ones, representing what the artist calls “desires and experiences,” are in various colors. Made of such everyday objects as zip-ties and aluminum rings, Gu’s “The Full Moon” is endearingly motley in closeup but suitably celestial from a distance. The large silver sphere is bristlingly busy but partly transparent, so that both its interior and exterior dimensions are perceptible. Perched on the museum’s lawn, “The Full Moon” balances within and without.

Jeff Bohlanger, “Last Migration” (Harmony Hall Art Center)

THE WORK OF KRISTIN BOHLANGER AND JEFF BOHLANGER can be tidily classified, but only by downplaying the many artistic detours revealed by “To Have and to Hold,” the married couple’s Harmony Hall Arts Center show. Kristin is a textile artist whose primary material is dyed sheep’s wool; Jeff is a collage-painter whose style sometimes recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s. They also collaborate to produce boxes filled with found objects, totems in the tradition of Joseph Cornell.

Many of Jeff’s mixed-media pieces are large and sprawling, and often made of multiple dovetailed panels. His creations incorporate stenciled text and fragments of commercial packaging, are coated with resin or shellac, and may have such 3D objects as metal coils affixed to the surface. In contrast to the improvisational extravagance of these works, the four-panel “Last Migration” is unified by repeated avian silhouettes.

Kristin’s wool pieces are abstract, but can resemble organic forms. The standout is “Breathe,” which was included in the McLean Project for the Arts’s “Women of the DMV” show. In this construction, the wool lines a nut-like wooden shape that’s trisected by three branches. Both members of this couple find a sense of order by emulating nature.

THE ESSENTIAL FORCE ILLUSTRATED by Michele Banks’s “Force of Nature” is diffusion. The D.C. artist’s blue-ink paintings, also at Harmony Hall, are rendered on Yupo paper. The surface is non-absorbent, so the pigment slowly spreads, yielding watery textures that gradually dry into permanence while retaining a sense of fluidity. Banks’s science-inspired abstractions depict a range of subjects, most often cosmic or microscopic.

The titles sometimes clearly identify the artist’s inspirations, which include “Black Hole” and “Mitochondria.” Three pictures array sets of nine human brains; the most interesting overlays cursive text atop the walnut-shaped organs, giving the composition depth that not all these paintings achieve. Fittingly, several titles refer to “waves,” which could be either electrical or aquatic. Whether Banks’s renderings are literal or theoretical, they represent a liquid universe.

Joan Danziger, “Creepy-eyed Beetle” (Amy Kaslow Gallery)

AT JOAN DANZIGER’S AMERICAN UNIVERSITY RETROSPECTIVE last spring, a few glittering beetles hugged the ceiling, overseeing the work of decades. Now the local sculptor’s insects have an exhibition of their own, “Beetlemania: Nature’s Warriors.” There aren’t enough sculptures in the Amy Kaslow Gallery show to represent all 400,000-plus species of beetles, but there are multiple variations: airy or solid, winged or not, and even ones that forfeit the exuberant colors for which the artist is known.

The most colorful creatures are mosaics of jewel-like glass fixed within wire frames, similar in form to the ravens Danziger showed at AU. There are also a few brightly hued beetles with solid bodies, including a metallic-red one made of fused glass and two multi-color ones built of painted celluclay. The latter technique yielded the most surprising sculptures: eight gray, black, and silvery beetles, grouped together on one wall as if sorting themselves into their own anti-rainbow coalition.

These sculptures are the least characteristic of the artist’s style, and yet can be seen as the crux of the show. By forgoing light-seizing glass, Danziger seems to be declaring the importance of all beetles, even ones that might not immediately catch the eye.

(Not) Strictly Painting 15

Through Nov. 7 at McLean Project for the Arts, 1234 Ingleside Ave., McLean. mpaart.org. 703-790-1953.

Betsy Packard

Through Nov. 4 at the Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. writer.org. 301-654-8664.

Artina 2026: Ripples of Ten Years

Through Nov. 8 at the Sandy Spring Museum, 17901 Bentley Rd., Sandy Spring.

Jeff and Kristin Bohlander: To Have & to Hold

Michelle Banks: Forces of Nature

Through Nov. 7 at Harmony Hall Arts Center, 10701 Livingston Rd., Fort Washington. pgparks.com/facilities/harmony-hall-art-center. 301-203-6070.

Joan Danziger: Beetlemania: Nature’s Warriors

Through Nov. 8 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Taegan Treichel, “Smile” (Adah Rose Gallery)

THE STYLES, TECHNIQUES, AND BACKGROUNDS of Kyujin Lee and Taegan Treichel are disparate, yet their paintings have an affinity that’s well demonstrated by “Surreal Horizons.” The Adah Rose Gallery show is a wonder-land of children’s toys, enchanted animals, and mysterious lights. While Treichel often swathes his vision in literal night, Lee’s work only hints at the darkness that underlies so many children’s tales.

Lee is a Seoul-born D.C. artist who has long worked in a similar mode. She begins her paintings with random gestures that gradually transmute into figurative images. Such fairy-tale characters as Pinocchio and the Little Mermaid appear in many of her pictures. Another recurring figure is Little Red Riding Hood, whose scarlet cloak offers a fiery contrast to the artist’s blue-heavy compositions. This selection of recent paintings also includes one that features a large bloom painted in yellow, a rare hue in Lee’s usually two-color work.

Treichel’s work is some ways more naturalistic. The Copenhagen artist employs a full range of colors, and often depicts shadowy forests and self-contained gardens in lush greens. His scenes resemble the real world, and his people and animals -- usually solitary -- are realistically rendered. Yet his pictures include fantastical elements and improbable juxtapositions. Cryptic messages are often encoded in light: glowing pink and yellow spheres encircle a stag in “Forest Mirage” and a string of lanterns resembles an upturned mouth in “Smile.”

At the bottom of the latter painting is a distant hamlet, its buildings reduced to toy-sized stature by perspective. These miniature houses and the ones that flank a tree in Treichel’s “Light Village” inadvertently echo the tiny structures in such Lee pictures as “Time and Time.” But the latter homes have Asian-style tile roofs, suggesting Lee’s Korean roots. Where Treichel’s imagery seems to be summoned entirely from childhood reveries, Lee’s makes oblique references to her actual youth. Yet both artists achieve something that’s psychically, if not visually, similar: conjuring alternate universes that fascinate and potentially disturb.

Tim Tate, “The Light We’re Owed: A Universal LGBTQ+ Bill of Rights in 36 Points” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A MINIATURE LOCAL ARTS SCENE ALL ITS OWN, the Washington Glass School is known for the impressive output of its co-directors, Michael Janis, Tim Tate, and Erwin Timmers, as well as its influence on many other artists. To mark the school’s 25th anniversary, one of its neighboring institutions, the Brentwood Arts Exchange, has mounted a tribute show. The only plausible complaint about “The Washington Glass School: 25 Years of Glass and Community” is that it’s not big enough.

The “community” aspect of the school’s mission is far-reaching. Tate often addresses gay life and issues, as he does in the show’s magnum opus, “The Light We’re Owed: A Universal LGBTQ+ Bill of Rights in 36 Points.” A relief sculpture in mostly gold glass, the piece consists of three dozen panels, each one a declaration of independence. Similarly monumental is Janis’s “How We Take Care of Each Other,” an expanse of almost-touching circles that ponders the human cost of COVID-era distancing strategies.

Glass is simultaneously heavy and light, and some of the most intriguing pieces use the material to simulate a very different substance. Timmers’s “Watered Down” appears to be a cascade of disposable water bottles, squashed into uselessness but with a long potential existence as river- and ocean-clogging trash. Rebecca Iafrati’s “Bonfire” evocatively renders flame as tendrils of reddish brown glass, frozen in mid-flicker.

Even the pieces that simply translate other media into glass, such as Jun Lee’s version of one of her large woodcuts of chickens, have a lustrous appeal. Not everyone can make glass artworks as distinctive as Janis, Tate, and Timmers’s, but a stint at the Washington Glass School seems likely to benefit just about any artist.

AS HE’S MOVED FROM MONOCHROMATIC PAINTINGS to vividly colored ones, Wayson R. Jones has crafted multiple series of similarly composed pictures. His latest show comprises two different sets of small pieces as well as one larger canvas that fits with none of the others. “Color/Slash/Field,” also at Brentwood, offers the local artist multiple paths to his next destination.

The largest group of artworks is 10 almost-square pictures in which Rothko-like rectangles float near the bottom of a field whose contrasting color shifts gradually. Jones takes inspiration from mid-20th-century Washington colorists, but doesn’t emulate their technique of staining canvas with thin acrylic pigment. His paint is mixed with pumice to yield a heavy, craggy presence.

The second bunch of pictures, six in all, is even more sculptural. Jones cut colorful pumice gel skins into various shapes and collaged them into arrangements that are more eccentric than his usual compositions. These paintings also rely on juxtaposition of shape and color, but in a far less systematic manner.

“House Mother and Child 2,” the largest work, adds sand and mica flake to the ingredients and swirls arcs of thick, overlapping paint over the shimmery backdrop. The emphatic gesturing comes as a surprise. Jones may still specialize in color/slash/field, but he’s taken a step toward abstract expressionism.

installation view of Borna Sammak’s “The Artist’s Way” (Von Ammon Co.)

THE AMERICAN FLAG IS A RECURRING MOTIF at Von Ammon Co., a venue where iconic mainstream-culture images are regularly roughed up. There are two sets of stars-and-stripes in Borna Sammak’s “The Artist’s Way,” a show of what appear to be straightforward paintings on canvas. Both pieces are titled “American Flag as Regular as Possible,” but only one earns that title. In the other, the 50 stars are flipped so their top points are at the bottom, facing downward. It’s a subtle shift, but a compellingly unsettling one that evokes the Satanic pentagram.

In the title picture, the subject has painted himself into a corner, a cartoon gag that serves as a neat metaphor for artistic self-disabling. Several other artworks are faithful reproductions of the logos of grunge, punk, or metalcore bands, a gambit that recalls the work of another New Yorker, Chris Bors.

Like many a pop artist before him, Sammak draws heavily from advertising and promotion. So it’s apt that he’s not literally a painter at all. These pictures were made by heat-applying vinyl to canvas, as if the artist were making T-shirts or retail signage. Perhaps that’s the point. Unlike Lichtenstein or Warhol, who added painterly touches to differentiate their work from its mass-produced models, Sammak embraces both the imagery and the technology of commercial art.

Also at Von Ammon, if a little hard to locate, is the semi-permanent installation of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s “Spider Wave.” Entered through a narrow portal that appears to have been torn from a drywall partition, the grotto-like space is presented as a “field office” of a fictional group, the Signal Ecology Institute. The duo’s collaboration is meant to exemplify, however facetiously, what a gallery note terms “the Palo Alto worldview.”

Within the small room are four large glazed-ceramic panels, one on the floor, whose semi-abstract designs have an Art Nouveau feel. The walls are covered with drawings, diagrams, and photos, amid which are placed 3D resin models encrusted with minerals, most of which look like geologic samples but which also feature a model of a computer monitor and keyboard. The overall effect is perplexing and yet -- as the artists surely intended -- vaguely ominous.

Alex Ebstein, detail of “Mirrored Petals” (PFA Gallery)

COLOR-FIELD ABSTRACTION WITH A LITERALLY SPORTY ASPECT, PFA Gallery’s “Re/Assemble” offers the work of two kindred artists who repurpose materials used in yoga and sailing. Primarily collagists, Alex Ebstein and Reed Anderson array such elementary geometric figures as circles, triangles, and diamonds. These are inherently flat, but the resulting artworks are not: Made partly of sliced yoga mats, Ebstein’s assemblages have heft that’s magnified with the addition of beads, twine, and other 3D ornaments. Anderson’s pieces are made of spinnaker fabric and are therefore thinner, but can hang independently in space rather than hug the wall.

Both artists endow simple forms with intriguing physicality. Anderson, who’s based in western Massachusetts, employs just a handful of simple shapes, supplemented by the occasional number. Yet his pieces\ assert themselves spatially. The largest is mounted perpendicularly to the wall to give it depth, and draped so it appears to careen through the space.

Ebstein, a Baltimorean, contrasts right-angled motifs with curved ones, as in the particularly elegant “Mirrored Petals.” The pattern in this piece is the result not of collage but of printing with PLA, a colorant for plastics. That makes the work look more like a traditional painting, but beneath the bright hues the texture of the yoga mat is clearly visible. Retaining evidence of their materials’s original purpose and essential qualities is crucial to both artists.

Clare Winslow, “Everything That Rises” (Clare Winslow)

THE TITLE OF “LAYERED LIVES: WOMEN IN PRINT” probably comes from “Map Key for a Layered Life,” a Suzanne Bartlett piece that’s a symphony of rumples. The artist, one of four whose work is now at Gallery B, makes large collages that incorporate nature photos, wrinkled fabric, free-form gestures, and screen patterns. Bartlett’s “forest women” series has a narrative quality that’s singular in this show, but her art’s complex textures are akin to those in the other participants’s entries.

Also literally layered are Barbara Bitondo’s sculptural two-ply constructions of looped paper and fabric, the exteriors smudgy black and the interiors watery blue. Clare Winslow’s prints are actually flat, but they appear to layer multiple strata: “Everything That Rises” arrays ribbons and strands that appear to float -- or ascend -- atop a marbled background of yellow and pastel blue. Kristine DeNinno’s hourglass-shaped prints, seen recently at Washington Printmakers Gallery, are mottled in muted yet striking shades of green and purple.

All four artists employ aspects of garment making, including stitchery, textiles, and such decorative materials as lace. These invoke traditional female labor, but are diverted decidedly from functional purposes. The elegant pieces in “Layered Lives” are made not for the body but for the eye.

Kyujin Lee & Taegan Treichel: Surreal Horizons

Through Oct. 31 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162.

The Washington Glass School: 25 Years of Glass and Community

Wayson R. Jones: Color/Slash/Field

Through Oct. 31 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com/facilities/brentwood-arts-exchange. 301-277-2863.

Borna Sammak: The Artist’s Way

Jonah Freeman + Justin Lowe: Spider Wave

Sammak through Nov. 1; Freeman + Lowe continuing indefinitely at Von Ammon Co., 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

Re/Assemble

Through Nov. 7 at Pazo Fine Art, 1932 9th St. NW (entrance at 1917 9 1/2 St. NW). pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.

Suzanne Bartlett, Barbara Bitondo, Kristine DeNinno, & Clare Winslow: Layered Lives: Women in Print

Through Nov. 1 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.

Jeffrey Smith, “Rappahannock 17” (Fred Schnider Gallery)

WASHINGTONIANS, LIKE MOST AMERICANS, live amid a forest of Indian names -- so many that they’re rarely even noticed. Growing up in McLean, Jeffrey Smith probably gave little thought to the designation of a nearby street: Powhatan. But that and other Native American place names provide the titles for all 17 works in “Paintings from the Powhatan Project,” the local artist’s impressive exhibition at the Fred Schnider Gallery of Art.

In his note on the show, Smith calls his recent pictures “an exploration of the natural and spiritual history of the Potomac and the Northern Neck.” That doesn’t mean his oils, painted on muslin or paper, are literally historical or geographical. Partly modeled via computer, the artworks combine the topographic, the decorative, and the abstract. Also, their precedents and inspirations reach well beyond the Washington region and Amerindian culture. Smith is a longtime employee of the institution now called the National Museum of Asian Art, and one of his interests is suminagashi, a centuries-old Japanese technique for marbling paper.

The artist seeks to evoke the processes of the natural world -- “growth, decay, seasons, tides, and wind” -- and so foregoes straight lines and right angles. Smith’s paintings are on shaped canvases that either echo or contrast their curving patterns. Four smaller pictures on paper are mounted on foamcore, subtly pushing the image forward. The effect of such anti-Cartesian gambits is to make the works register as things in themselves, and not just streamlined representations of such forms as tree rings, water ripples, and star flickers.

For all their precision, Smith’s pictures are as sensuously painterly as the canvases dripped, splashed, and poured by mid-20th-century color-field artists. The hues, mostly earth tones, are intricately mottled and charismatically smudgy -- and, in the smaller works, engrossingly grainy. In a picture like “Tappahannock 12,” dovetaiiling curves and blocks of solid pigment frame areas in which colors gently melt into each other. “The Powhatan Project” is a symbolic rendering of an entire area, but it’s also the testament of a singular hand.

Ben Ferry, “Shore Religion” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)

HE’S NOT EXACTLY A MAGICAL REALIST, but Ben Ferry is a representational artist who specializes in enchanted locations. These frequently feature water and light, two fluid substances the D.C. artist most often renders, appropriately, with watercolor. The paintings and drawings in “Take the Long Way Home,” Ferry’s third Gallery Neptune & Brown solo show, depict everyday serenity. They represent what the artist’s statement calls “a disconnect from the chaos.”

Derived from visits to the Eastern Shore and the Pacific Northwest, Ferry’s pictures portray everyday small towns as places of refuge. “Shore Religion” is titled that in part because it’s centered on an old wooden church, but what’s most transcendent about the artwork is the symphony of sunlight and multi-hued shadows that plays across the scene. Other pictures, notably “Sun Dancing” and the shimmering “Smolder,” contemplate even more prosaic structures that are sanctified by natural light.

Ferry’s subjects, which include boats, two-lane roads, and sleeping dogs, are almost too comfy. What distinguishes his paintings and drawings are exceptional skill, an eye for beguiling detail, and -- in some dynamic instances -- immersive compositions. While most of these pictures observe from a distance, a few of them place the viewer in the middle of things: aboard a small boat in “Crabbing Off Madrona Point” or seated on the porch in “Red Table, Green Chair.” In these vignettes, Ferry doesn’t merely capture the beauty of the quiet life; he compels the spectator into it.

Kyle Butler, “All Approach, No Arrival” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

THE WORLD IS SOLID YET TENTATIVE in the multi-media creations of Kyle Butler. The emblematic entry in the Buffalo artist’s VisArts show, “All Approach, No Arrival,” is a large wooden model of a bridge that dominates the smaller of the Kaplan Gallery’s two rooms. The seven-foot-high structure is imposing but pointedly incomplete: A missing center span shifts the construction from a likeness of a bridge to a metaphor for uncertainty.

“All Approach, No Arrival” is VisArts’s 2026 Mentoring Curator Exhibition, supervised by John Massler of Buffalo’s Hardwalls Contemporary Arts Center. The show is about half painting, with the rest sculpture save for one performance video. In “Leisurely Confronting the Abyss,” the artist drags a recliner chair through a city to its lakefront, where he sits and watches a sunset that appears benign but is -- to judge by the spectator’s final reaction -- actually terrifying.

Butler’s intimations of chaos are tidily packaged. “Garbage Facade” employs real trash, but turns out to be a sort of stage set. The paintings, derived from online mapping sites, are hard-edged and have a vague sense of place, gently disrupted by overlaid bars and swoops. Wooden-lattice wall pieces appear to be cohering and unraveling at the same time. Closest to the spirit of pop art is a sculpture of a mop whose head takes the form of a large tongue -- one of this array’s few acknowledgments of human flesh.

“Tongue Mop” is predominantly peach-colored, which might seem a bow to realism if only that hue didn’t dominate the show. All the wooden pieces, even the towering partial bridge, are the same color. The paintings are mostly in shades of gray, but with peach tints or accents. Butler may be alarmed by the world, but his palette is ironically mild.

Rozeal., “Las Tres, Dos Decks (pieces of peace)” (Spilt Gallery)

INSPIRED BY JAPANESE VISUAL CULTURE and an eccentric J-fashion subculture, Rozeal. began making distinctive paintings some 25 years ago. The local artist borrows from traditional Japanese art, notably ukiyo-e woodblock prints, but incorporates elements of Black American hip-hop culture. This idiosyncratic mashup was sparked in part by ganguro, a 1990s vogue in which some Tokyo youth made their skin as dark as possible. (Guro is a form of kuro, Japanese for “black.”)

Rozeal. is still working with these ingredients, but more loosely. Many of the paintings and prints in her Spilt Gallery show, “Seed of Faith > Seed of Memory,” look like deconstructions of her earlier work. Compositions appear improvisational, and renderings are sketchier. The recent paintings are embellished randomly with pigment drips, and one is a near-abstraction that transmutes audio speakers into a Japanese-style decorative motif. Several 3D pieces are built of multiple layers, as if paintings were taken apart and then reassembled into haphazard mikoshi -- portable shrines. The notion of sacredness is underscored by the abundant use of gold, evoking Japanese temples.

As the show’s title indicates, Rozeal. is pondering memory. The show’s talismans of childhood include cartoon bears, a kid-sized big-wheeled car, and small 3D-printed plastic figures. More disturbing is a painting of a Japanese/Black woman who’s wearing boxing gloves and bleeding from the mouth, a picture titled “A.R.T. (Always Reliving Trauma: All you heard was papa don’t hit me no more...).” Whether or not this scenario is autobiographical, it does suggest another reason for Rozeal.’s attraction to Edo-period Japanese art. It was an era of relative peace, bristling with thoughts of remembered violence.

Matina Marki Tillman, “Humanography 3 (in absentia)” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

WOMEN WILL THEMSELVES OR OTHERS INTO EXISTENCE in the exquisitely detailed prints of Matina Marki Tillman, a longtime mainstay of the Washington Printmakers’s Gallery. Among the exemplary works in the Connecticut artist’s “Humanography: Paramythia” is “Humanography 3 (in absentia),” in which a woman paints a portrait of a man. A solarplate etching derived from a charcoal-and-pencil drawing, the picture is lushly textured and exactingly realistic. Both Tillman and the artist she depicts are exceptionally precise limners.

Tillman was born and raised in Greece, and calls on that nation’s ancient myths for themes and motifs. (”Paramythia” means both “fairy tales” and “consolation,” according to the artist’s statement.) So Icarus tumbles from a fire-escape stairway, and a black-and-white Ariadne wraps pink thread around her figure. Many of the prints are twinned, whether in mirrored images like those of “A little bird told me” or the pairing of “musician messenger” and “jester warrior.”

The majority of these prints are monochromatic or almost so, accented with modest touches of color. That last duo is one of just two sets that were printed in blue and red, respectively. Just two, “Magic Water” and “Poisoned Tree,” are in full color, the result of a mix of drawing and digital collage that yielded blurred backgrounds, suggesting rapid motion. While the other pictures are less kinetic, they address change in various ways. Yet Tillman, in a show dedicated to her mother, also exalts continuity.

Jeffrey Smith: Paintings from the Powhatan Project

Through Oct. 25 at Fred Schnider Gallery of Art, 888 N. Quincy St., Arlington. fredschnidergalleryofart.com. 301-852-8042.

Ben Ferry: Take the Long Way Home

Through Oct. 31 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.

Kyle Butler: All Approach, No Arrival

Through Oct. 25 at Kaplan Gallery, VisArts, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. www.visartscenter.org. 301-315-200.

Rozeal.: Seed of Faith > Seed of Memory

Through Oct. 24 at Spilt Gallery, 2529 P St. NW. spiltdc.com. 202-527-0373.

Matina Marki Tillman: Humanography: Paramythia

Through Oct. 25 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Gary Anthes, “Apartment Lobby, Havana” (Studio Gallery)

METAL DEVICES MAY NOT GET MORE USEFUL as they age, but they certainly get more interesting to look at. While the objects Gary Anthes photographed for “Time, Tools, and Technology” are not literal antiques, most of them have a patina of rust or dust -- visible history.

Some new stuff is documented in the Studio Gallery show, including Eurostar trains, sleek and potentially kinetic at a London terminus, and a computer processor that’s considerably less charismatic. But most of the things and places Anthes memorializes are much older. They serve as monuments not only to themselves but, often, to vanished ways of life.

Not every aged machine is obsolete, although some continue in use past their time. A Havana apartment lobby with battered walls and a haphazard array of electrical wires is certainly not in optimum condition, but the anachronistic space beckons the viewer inside, a signal Anthes underscores with canny composition: Light seeps into a shadowy front room through an arched doorway, as if there’s a brighter world just beyond.

The lighting and framing are impeccable, whether the photo is a closeup of 1940s-vintage vacuum tubes or a wide shot of scrap metal heaped at Newark’s port. Nearly everything on display is man-made, and the elaborate wood grain in “Fish and Frog Gig” serves primarily as a pictorial foil for the rusted implement that rests atop it. Anthes depicts the ravages of time, but also offers a nod to human ingenuity.

The graceful abstractions that Eleanor Kotlarik Wang calls “Meanderings” could be described as textile art, but they’re made mostly of ink. The textile aspect comes from their inspiration: vintage lace objects given to the local artist and employed as templates or models. Some of the resulting pictures are silkscreens that faithfully reproduce the patterning of the original lace while jarring its delicacy with bold colors. Others are freehand drawings on mottled backgrounds whose gestures emulate the lace only loosely.

The pictures, curated by Adah Rose Bitterbaum, give roughly equal prominence to line and color. The latter may be secondary to most of the compositions, yet is rich and complex enough to compete with the foregrounded motifs. The dappled hues suggest fading and corrosion, adding to the artwork’s sense of ancientness. In the most immersive picture, “Unchartered Territory III,” a small square of lace fades to white at the center of a marbled ice-blue field, as if melting into oblivion. The reality wanes, but the pattern endures.

In a playful set of photo-collages, also at Studio, Christopher Corson revisits the “Animal Instincts” of his childhood. The artist is known as a sculptor of charred human figures, but this show isn’t entirely out of character. His statues often open to reveal hidden aspects of their subjects’s personalities, a tactic that parallels the strategy of these mostly sepia-toned composite pictures.

Curated by Mary Welch Higgins, the photos overlay images of wild animals on snapshots of Corson between the ages of 2 and 11. Many of the creatures appear fierce, with conspicuous incisors or fangs. In the one picture that’s not merged with one of an animal, the 3-year-old points what seems to be a toy gun at the viewer. The boy doesn’t look all that menacing, but Corson wants viewers to wonder just how feral he was.

Pat Silbert, “The River as Home” (Waverly Street Gallery)

THE NATURAL WORLD HAS SO MANY ASPECTS that Pat Silbert can’t restrict herself to a single image at a time. Her exquisitely detailed landscape paintings are usually inset with smaller pictures, often of birds or other animals. Indeed, the local artist’s attempts to capture nature’s bounty overflow the main surface -- often traditional Nepali paper mounted on canvas -- and continue on the canvases’s edges. In Silbert’s Waverly Street Gallery show, “A River Is Alive,” photo-inspired renderings of the Potomac River and a rustic New Hampshire region are layered and fractured, the inserted panels usually framed within craggy gold borders.

Gold represents enlightenment in Buddhism, and some of Silbert’s pictures are punctuated by small golden Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (people who have achieved nirvana but remain in the world to guide others). Other paintings incorporate organic artifacts, such a loon feather and a bit of white-birch bark, or a line from nature-besotted poet Gerald Manley Hopkins. One picture contains a visual quotation from a canvas by 15th-century Italian artist Fra Angelico. The show’s title itself responds to the name of British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 book, “Is a River Alive?”

Not all rivers are alive, however, and many are in far from robust health. An impetus for this set of paintings is the damage the artist has surveyed in New Hampshire, where a warming climate is devastating paper bark birches. One of the pictures, “This Floating World,” is a pictorial catalogue of endangered organisms, some of them exceptionally ancient. Silbert’s multi-image paintings simultaneously portray multiple facets of a single location, or type of location. But they also stack the bucolic scenes with layers that are alive to history and spirituality as well as place.

Michael Gessner, “Green Heart” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

IN A MOST CONGENIAL PAIRING, Michael Gessner and Elzbieta Sikorska fill Portico Gallery at Studio 3807 with art derived from natural forms and phenomena. Sikorska’s contributions to “Earth Signs” are mixed-media abstractions on artist-made paper, sometimes adorned with densely arrayed yet readable text. Gessner also uses artisanal paper, but in sculptural works that often mix shaped and found wood. While some of Gessner’s creations are substantial, all of his and Sikorska’s pieces are wall-mounted.

Titles such as “Shell” and “Swirl” announce the curving forms that feature in Sikorska’s mixed-media works, which are mostly executed in muted natural hues that evoke wood and stone, earth and bone. In “Spirals and Ladders” it’s the text, written in silver ink, that coils. There’s a sense of mutability and transience in the artist’s intricate renderings, so it’s fitting that she borrows some words from Ovid, author of “Metamorphoses.” Sikorska’s artworks suggest nature at its slipperiest.

Openings are a central motif in Gessner’s works, whether they’re made of wood or paper. One of the heaviest pieces is a sequence of overlapping wooden medallions, each with a naturally occurring hole near its center. The breaches are subtler in such primarily paper constructions, as “Green Heart” and “Split.” The latter is barely open, offering the slightest glimpse of a reddish interior through a slit that recalls a surgical incision. Evoking both plant tissue and human flesh, Gessner’s sculptures invite the eye into mysterious interiors.

Sobia Ahmad, “The flame calls out to the moths of the city” (Hamiltonian Artists)

LIGHT IS THE CRUX OF SOBIA AHMAD’S Hamiltonian Artists show, which consists primarily of deeply shadowed images. Sparked by an old Sufi parable and devotional Qawwali music, “Entangled Light” uses silver-gelatin photography to evoke a world whose darkness is only intermittently illuminated.

The physicality of analog photography is central to the Pakistan-born local artist’s method. “Landing” and “Flight” are soft contact prints of rolls of exposed film, blurred and barely legible on black backgrounds. A few pictures freeze the action of disembodied arms and hands, some of them belonging to Qawwali singers in ecstatic performance. The show’s title installation covers a wall with haphazardly placed photographs of cryptic subjects, designed to bemuse and disorient. Nearby is a video montage, made in collaboration with Benny Shaffer, that’s more colorful but equally elusive.

The Sufi fable is about the desire to unite with the disembodied divine, but Ahmad’s art is essentially tangible. These photos were made with homemade developers synthesized from such commonplace and unexalted substances as food compost, and their images were intentionally, if randomly, altered by fingerprints, light leaks, and other contaminants. In Ahmad’s work, the celestial can only be glanced from afar, the path to transcendence barred by the dogged persistence of the everyday.

Sophia McCracken, “Sensitive Fern” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

AN EPILOGUE TO THE “WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE DMV” project that began more than a year ago, “The Thank You Show” collects work by women who were especially helpful to curator and initiator Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello. Displayed in the smaller of the Black Rock Center for the Arts’s two galleries, the exhibition is not sweeping or definitive. But it’s a nice coda to the region-wide, 20-venue undertaking, and features one artwork that is, aptly, a different sort of appreciation: Prudence Bonds’s portrait of (and homage to) Alma Thomas, a pioneering local woman artist from an earlier generation.

The sculptural works include three intriguing examples of alternative monuments. Veronica Szalus’s towering ecological totem is constructed of such repurposed materials as wire mesh and painted paper tubes, while Margery Goldberg’s vision of cross-cultural affinity is a circle of eight stylized humanoids made of a “rainbow coalition” of different varieties of wood. Sophia McCracklin offers a different sort of memorial, an oversized facsimile of a fern leaf rendered in wire-supported green Dacron.

Among the two-dimensional highlights are Helen Frederick’s pulp painting, a “Skyscape” featuring Rothko-like rough rectangles; one of Lisa Battle’s elegantly sinuous painted-ceramic forms; and a Michele Banks painting that can be read as a medical illustration or a graceful abstraction. Marcie Wolf-Hubbard’s earthy contribution is a charcoal drawing with literal depth, since its rendering of three mourning doves is upholstered with thick encaustic.

“Alma” aside, the show is short on images of women who meet the viewer’s gaze. Teresa Oaxaca’s vast painting depicts a woman who’s peering off to one side surrounded by babies, everyone in frilly garb and appearing vaguely alarmed. In Linda Button’s oil, three mannequins in a display window are partly obscured by reflections on the glass. In Oaxaca and Button’s pointed pictures, women are seen, but don’t look.

Gary Anthes: Time, Tools, and Technology

Eleanor Kotlarik Wang: Meanderings

Christopher Corson: Animal Spirit

Through Oct. 24 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734.

Pat Silbert: A River Is Alive

Through Oct. 24 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.

Michael Gessner & Elzbieta Sikorska: Earth Signs

Through Oct. 24 at Portico Gallery at Studio 3807, 3807 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. portico3807.com. 202-487-8458.

Sobia Ahmad: Entangled Light

Through Oct. 24 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW. hamiltonianartists.org. (202) 332-1116.

Women Artists of the DMV: The Thank You Show

Through Oct. 18 at Black Rock Center for the Arts, 12901 Town Commons Dr., Germantown. blackrockcenter.org. 301-528-2260.

Soomin Ham, “East and West” (Multiple Exposures Gallery)

WITH HER KNACK FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THE UNSEEABLE, Soomin Ham can convey a sense of absence -- often, though not always, involving her family history. The artist’s current Multiple Exposures show ponders a different sort of loss. The South Korea-born local photographer’s “In Gray” illustrates her own displaced identity. Traveling between two homelands, she found herself “an outsider in both worlds,” according to her statement.

Ham expresses this alienation partly with two groups of diptychs, pictorially linked or flipped; one part is overlaid with white acrylic paint and the other with black Korean ink. Each of the paired images is difficult to discern, but in different ways. Another set of related pictures depicts a forest, printed either very darkly or very lightly, and with narrow insets in the opposite scheme fitted into the larger composition. Ham calls these punctuated photos the “Window series.” Again, the act of looking becomes an effort, not something that can be done without thought.

A view outside through an actual window is included in the “Revisited series,” but most of these pictures depict trees or their parts -- branches, stumps, or a single “Last Leaf,” soft as if already fading into memory. Trees “are metaphors for myself -- physically rooted in the land, yet continually changing with the world around them, “ Ham writes.

Since some of the subjects are “revisited,” they probably are things or places Ham has observed before. But their significance isn’t evident to the spectator. In fact, what the artist photographs seems less important than what happens to the images later. They may be printed on Korean hanji paper -- another token of Ham’s origins -- or layered with ink, paint, or wax. Since the pictures are all black-and-white, the results are visually stark. Yet their surfaces can be lushly hand-worked, transforming the photos from mechanical representations into personal totems. The outsider in both worlds crafts little worlds of her own.

Liz Tran, “Peony” (Morton Fine Art)

A VEGETATIVE VARIETY OF ACTION PAINTING, Liz Tran’s art uses the evidence of her brushwork as a metaphor for ongoing change. The bright, lively pictures in the Pacific Northwest artist’s “Bloom/Become” conjure floral arrangements from random drips and blots, accented by painstakingly placed dots of pigment. The mixed-media abstractions in Tran’s Morton Fine Art show feel improvisational, yet their underlying compositions appear carefully considered, and even flirt with symmetry.

Although half the pictures bear titles that refer to flowers, the imagery is not literally botanical. For all their floweriness, the painted forms also suggest other things, from teeming jungles to psychedelic updates of Rohrschach ink blots. “Amulet Two” does resemble an ornate piece of jewelry, and “The Weight of Rain” is suitably drizzly. Sometimes a hint of a human form or face peers through the fluid color, although close viewing reveals just hue and texture, including an unexpected graininess that recalls canvases from the early days of stained-acrylic color-field exploration.

A few of the paintings have almost-solid backdrops that silhouette the highlighted forms, but more often the artist’s compositions, for all their intricate activity, convey a sense of openness. If Tran’s fundamental subject is change, her pictures offer pliant shapes, fluid colors, and spaces in which transformation can proceed.

installation view of Robin Bell’s “Projection Warnings” (photo by Pat Graham)

ROBIN BELL IS BEST KNOWN FOR WRITING REBUKES to Donald Trump in light, so it’s fitting that his current exhibition, “Projection Warnings,” announces itself with two text-displaying video-spheres in the windows of Addison/Ripley Fine Art. Words circle the globes, rotating an artist’s statement and biography, complete with an incongruously upbeat quotation from Italian Marxian Antonio Gramsci, who did much of his influential writing during a decade spent in Mussolini’s prisons.

Inside the Wisconsin Avenue door are two sets of 24 square photographs of Bell’s many projections, some overlaid with paint that challenges the images’s purely documentary value. On the adjacent wall is a video that compiles what is essentially the entire show (and more) into a 30-minute montage. Although the artist intends to “protect democracy one projection at a time,” not all the entries are political -- or electronic. Included are abstract paintings, collages, and sculptures, only a few of which incorporate slogans.

Although most of Bell’s artworks are plugged-in, he takes inspiration from trees and cacti. “Milk Tree Square” is a video with digital animation, depicting slo-mo mists atop plants. “It All Starts with a Tree” is a digital projection on canvas of a plant with a green halo, a moving image that’s similar to the static one in the adjacent painting. The natural world fuels the electronic one, and vice versa. It seems that those video-spheres in the gallery’s windows exemplify Bell’s approach, in which every input is a small bend in a potentially endless feedback loop.

Lucy J Blankstein, “Solus Rex” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

GOLDEN FRAMES SEPARATE SOME OF THE ART WORKS in “Gilt by Association,” a 13-artist exhibition in the rotunda of American University’s Katzen Arts Center. But most of these frames are partly painted styrofoam, a quirky touch that’s entirely appropriate to this lively, far from cohesive array. The participants, who call themselves the Ward Circle faction, are not linked by subject, style, or outlook. Two of the contributors, Claudia Vess and Lucy J Blankstein, curated the selection, including work by three deceased artists: Myrtle Katzen, Luciano Penay, and Patricia Segnan.

Many of the pieces are representational, if in different modes. Michael Graham’s mixed-media pictures recall lushly rendered neoclassical paintings, while Norman Strike’s political linocuts are simple and direct. Romeo Segnan gently conjures a ship on water in a softly defined print. Blankstein makes realism out of abstraction, turning a free-form painting into the body of a man whose sculpted head is topped with a crown.

Both crown and face are golden, and Blankstein also offers the literal, if punning, “Gold Bricking” and “Gold Digger” -- a gilded brick and shovel, respectively. Few of the other artists make a big thing of gold, although there’s a hint of the color in the winged insects, fluttering on a dark blue background, in Julia Zahn’s elegant mixed-media “Night Sky.”

Many of the standouts are works on paper, delicate in form if substantial in effect. Marjorie Hirano’s pencil-outlined watercolors, abstract but suggestive of floral forms, are quietly lovely. Zahn’s layered pictures, influenced by Japanese paste-resist stencil dyeing, transform nature scenes into archetypal patterns. Just as hushed, yet politically charged, are Vess’s depictions of war-ravaged buildings, presumably in Kyiv. Using assemblage to evoke half-demolished buildings is cannily ironic.

J. Ford Huffman, “Four” (Watergate Gallery)

THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE DON’T FEATURE notably in “2026 The American Mosaic,” Watergate Gallery’s apolitical semiquincentennial exhibition, but sculptor J. Ford Huffman makes much of another color troika: red, yellow, and blue. Those primaries serve as individual backdrops for a set of three black stars inset with secondary-color blocks, and decorate a mostly white model of a structure that looks like a Mondrian painting repurposed as a midrise building. It’s one of several pieces evoking early-20th-century artistic developments that were more European than American.

Another of the eight artists, Helen Zughaib, colorizes the light-hued stone of the Washington Monument in a print that’s one in a series internationalizing local landmarks by superimposing vibrant patterns from Middle Eastern fabrics. (Some of these were also seen in “Diasporacity,” a Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library show that closed last month.) The effect is jaunty and playfully disorienting, and entirely compatible with Roberto Werebe’s multi-hued, rakishly geometric renderings of buildings and other subjects (including a trippy tiger).

Elsewhere, blue dominates, notably in painter Vian Borchert’s octet of near-abstract seascapes. Sabrina Pedreira’s tropical land- and waterscapes are also heavy on blue, but the largest is white-on-white, with frond-like shapes incised in the pigment. A more expansive, if muted, palette prevails in Tisha Balesi Wood’s two small expressionist paintings.

Pedreira’s sculptural picture is as sleekly stylized as Phillipe Mougne’s Cubist-style steel statue, a spindly mashup of man and machine. Since they’re made of found objects, Lauri Menditto’s sculptures are funkier. The artist studs lengths of driftwood with reclaimed Potomac River glass, yielding symbolic creatures that appear both bristling and precarious. These are mosaics of a sort, locally sourced but otherwise -- like the rest of this show -- only incidentally American.

Soomin Ham: In Gray

Through Oct. 11 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.

watergategalleryframedesign.com. 202-338-4488.

Robin Bell: Projection Warnings

Through Oct. 17 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.

Liz Tran: Bloom/Become

Through Oct. 19 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. 202-628-2787. Open by appointment.

Gilt by Association

Through Oct. 11 at Katzen Arts Center rotunda, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. group93wash@aol.com. 301-461-1124.

2026 The American Mosaic

Through Oct. 17 at Watergate Gallery, 2552 Virginia Ave. NW. watergategalleryframedesign.com. 202-338-4488.

Ellen Hill, “Kentucky Wonder” (Pyramid Atlantic Art Center)

FOR WEDDED COUPLES, THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY is the first one. For two institutions nurtured by artist and curator Helen C. Frederick, this year is actually the tin anniversary: ten years, both for Frederick’s Reading Road Studio and for the Hyattsville location of Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, which she founded in 1981. In celebration, the latter venue presents the sprawling “Ruminations: Our Stories in Paper,” with works by Frederick and 29 other artists.

The selection includes many prints and collages, but also paper pulp paintings and sculptural pieces made of cast paper. As Frederick’s statement notes, the collected art “treats paper not as a passive surface but as an active collaborator.” Frederick shows how this is done in five texturally rich works, notably “Two Masks -- Jaguar and Aztec,” in which two molded brown countenances bulge from circles mounted on a lattice made of homegrown flax.

Among the other notable 3D works are three by William B. Adair, including a cast paper door gilded with metallic leaf; Susan Firestone’s tantalizing cast-paper visage, yellow on a vivid blue background; Emily Fussner’s wall-mounted web of green, black, and brown paper tendrils that cast spiraling shadows; Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter’s orange-heavy assemblage, a musical explosion that incorporates a vinyl record; June Linowitz’s poignant wall-mounted array of threatened animals, all flattened and entirely white; Alice Quatrochi’s kinetic sculptural version of a Rohrschach ink blot, constructed of dyed handmade paper and anchored by a metal armature; and Yuriko Yamaguchi’s wire mesh framework filled with charred paper -- the remains of the artist’s daily burnings of Donald Trump’s latest social media posts.

Other entries are flatter, yet conjure depths. Oletha DeVane’s black print on red artist-made paper arranges familiar suburban domestic elements into a sort of cul-de-sac mandala. Cheryl Edwards’s pulp painting of a woman contrasts an archetypal form with an intricately mottled surface. Fleming Jeffries’s print on artist-dyed silk fills an ocean-blue field with whales and mechanical devices, floating in apparent harmony. Elzbieta Sikorska’s drawing-painting-collage on jaggedly shaped artist-made paper conjures a desert expanse. Lynn Sures layers haunting drawings of human skulls on flecked artist-made paper.

The color and texture of the paper in many of these pieces are appealing in their own right, but they also have metaphorical depth. They evoke the many layers of existence that underlie our lives and our stories.

Sarah Hardesty, “Blaze” (Cody Gallery)

ABSTRACT PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES ASPIRE to the status of natural phenomena in “Terrane,” a three-artist show at Marymount University’s Cody Gallery. Most of the pieces are little, and often grouped together in visual suites. The artists’s visions are so compatible that one cluster congenially arrays the work of two of the contributors, Olivia Baldwin and Lisa Perez.

A terrane is a slab of the Earth’s crust that has shifted to an area with which it’s geologically unrelated. The three participants -- all based in Rhode Island, although Sarah Hardesty taught at Marymount until 2025 -- use the term “as a metaphor for explorations of nature, time, memory, and materiality,” according to their statement. The artists’s visible methods echo geological processes.

Baldwin offers small sculptural objects, several titled “Chunk” plus a number, and larger pieces made of painted canvas and draped on the wall with intentional ungainliness. Hardesty primarily contributes paintings on paper or wood, the latter ones usually layered with pigment and scored with lines that suggest claw marks. Perez makes small watercolors, sometimes with collaged elements and often cut into boulder-like shapes. While much of the work is black-and-white, one of Baldwin’s chunks is bright fuchsia, and submerged red can be glimpsed under the gray veil of Hardesty’s “Blaze.”

The rockiness of the work is expressed variously, through color and shape as well as heft. Yet some of the most beguiling pieces are intriguingly ethereal. Hardesty’s “Stepping Stones,” painted vertically on a hanging paper scroll, has a calligraphic quality, and Perez’s “Clamber, Cleave, Rumple, Recede” conjures stone or bone with a watery blend of blue and tan. In such pieces, mineral hues and shapes very nearly turn into air.

Helen Zughaib, “Blue City”

LANDSCAPES ARE TREATED WITH VARYING DEGREES of literalism in “Views of Color,” a five-artist exhibition at the ADA Art Gallery. The participants, all local except for Californian Andrew Faulkner, distill vistas in different ways and with disparate results. The show, which was curated by Edith Graves, is keyed as much to pattern as color.

That’s especially true of the work of Karen Schulz, a textile artist, and Helen Zughaib, who’s showing prints. Schulz’s quilted pieces are abstract, but their motifs and hues suggest cityscapes. The vibrant “Make of It What You Will” juxtaposes smears of red with stacked rectangles in the color of concrete. The stylized “Blue City” is the most complex of Zughaib’s pictures. A flattened and compressed clutter of doors, windows, and fluttering cloths, the scene is held together by the checkerboard pattern of the pavement that leads the eye (and potentially the robed man at the front of the composition) into the urban jumble.

“Blue City” is the most vertical of Zughaib’s prints, which aligns it with Ellen Sinel’s paintings of upward-thrusting forests and grasslands. Light, notably from a sunset-red sky, is important in these pictures, the most realistic in the show. Sinel has long painted forests, but the two paintings of grasses are less expected. Depicted in closeup so they fill the frame just as fully as the trees do, the blades appear both fragile and dynamic, and their sharply defined spikes are set off by milky sunlight.

Most of Sinel’s hues are soft, but bolder than those of Karen Deans, whose landscape-like abstractions are mostly pastel. While strong blacks feature in some of her pictures, such standouts as “Fiona’s Cup” are executed in a muted mix of oil and wax crayon. The pictorial elements are diverse and intricately tangled, yet unified by the hushed palette.

Faulkner’s pictures are the simplest of the lot, but distinguished by their fluid colors. Working with well-diluted oil paints, the artist depicts elemental geological forms that appear to melt into sky and sea. The most striking of Faulkner’s three contributions, “Teal Point,” is emblematic of the entire show: Under a pink sky, a blue outcropping liquefies into pure color.

Scott Suchman, untitled (Leica store)

ONE SUBJECT OF SCOTT SUCHMAN’S Leica Store show is identified in its name, “Mumbai Market Day.” The other is announced by the silver of small fish, the pale green of bagged grapes, and the blue and orange of three women’s saris. The D.C. photographer traveled to India to collect delicious colors.

In three of the 23 pictures, merchants gaze directly as the camera, engaging with the photographer and the viewer. More often, though, the human presence is reduced to a hand or two -- reaching, mixing, serving, holding, carrying. Sometimes people are represented just by their tools, such as the small pair of yellow-handled scissors perched a pile of dried red chili peppers. Suchman has a superb eye for contrasting colors and striking juxtapositions of form and texture. Simple bins and baskets are neatly framed so they serve as topographic features in landscapes of fruits and vegetables.

Suchman works as a food photographer, a gig that must have cultivated the sensibility he brings to these pictures. The subjects can be funky -- Mumbai is rather different from the plastic-wrapped U.S. -- but the images are lush, crisp, and carefully lighted. The photographer deftly uses flash to supplement available light. He doesn’t banish darkness, notably the shadow cast by an arm on the edge of a pile of shrimp or the unseeable rear area of a shop packed with products in a symphony of hues. While Suchman’s pictures are mostly closeups, they collectively conjure a world that’s vast and teeming.

Gavin Sewell, “Lighting on the Masthead” (Zenith Gallery)

MANY AMERICAN FLAGS UNFURL in Zenith Gallery’s “New Works by Gallery Artists Celebrating Our Country’s 250th Birthday.” Gavin Sewell offers a set of three red, white, and blue banners, each intricately layered with gestures and one collaged with pop-culture relics. Philip Hazard swirls tricolor neon squiggles atop a flag painted on battered wood. The neon lurks behind the wood, adding twinkling pinpoint stars to the canton of a wooden flag constructed in shades of natural brown by gallery proprietor Margery Goldberg.

In his distinctive style, Joanathan Bessaci layers scraps of road maps to carve a likeness of George Washington, but more characteristic of the show is his rendering of Frederick Douglass, incorporating maps of two places he lived, Anacostia and Rochester. Other works include images of Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Bob Marley -- the last two elegantly painted by Scion Derby. This is a stirring assortment of the portraits the current administration would like to rip from American history textbooks.

Ruminations: Our Stories in Paper

Through Oct. 4 at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St., Hyattsville. pyramidatlanticartcenter.org. 301-608-9101.

Olivia Baldwin, Sarah Hardesty, Lisa Perez: Terrane

Through Oct. 9 at Cody Gallery, Marymount University Ballston Center, 1000 N. Glebe Rd., Arlington. marymount.edu/academics/college-of-business-innovation-leadership-and-technology/school-of-design-and-art/cody-gallery/#gsc.tab=0

View of Colors

Through Oct. 15 at ADA Art Gallery, 1627 21st St. NW. adawdc.org/en/page/13/culture. 202-621-6633.

Scott Suchman: Mumbai Market Day

Through Oct. 2 at Leica, 977 F St. NW. 202-787-5900. leicacamerausa.com/pages/leica-stores/leica-store-dc.html

New Works by Gallery Artists Celebrating Our Country’s 250th Birthday

Through Oct. 3 at Zenith Gallery, 1429 Iris St. NW. zenithgallery.com. 202- 783-2963.

Sarah Spector, “Blue Orb” (courtesy of the artist)

THE MAJORITY OF THE PICTURES IN SARAH SPECTOR’S Waverly Street Gallery show are landscapes, yet those aren’t the focus of the exhibition. On one wall are two-dozen tiny watercolors, plus a lone drawing, that depict the gentle contours and soft light of Block Island. That locale probably didn’t prompt the title of “Transcendent Terrains: Outer Landscapes and Inner Temples,” whose larger canvases are mixed-media abstractions. But it does suggest that the local artist sees a connection between observable and internal realms.

Like the 1950s abstract expressionists who surely must be among her inspirations, Spector glories in the qualities of paint. Large slabs of color are heavily worked, and drips punctuate the compositions. Horizontal streaks and furrows complicate the vibrant color fields, which are sometimes set off by such bold contrasts as the smudgy azure bar that bobs at the top of the mostly orange “Blue Smoke Hovering.” The titles of many of the paintings refer to the sun, the sky, or the ocean -- phenomena that are both specific sights and boundless concepts.

Roughly half of the larger pieces are collage-paintings that incorporate such detritus as paper scraps, snippets of gold foil and even a painted bottle cap. These pictures invert the strategy of the other ones, in which objects appear to be submerged beneath the pigment. Perhaps the buried items are just thick areas of paint, but the unexplained crags and curves add mystery and a sense of depth to the artworks. Gazing into a Spector painting is like peering into a vast expanse of sea or sky: Part of the appeal is imagining things unseen.

Joyce McCarten, “Cottonwood Canyon” (Studio Gallery)

ANOTHER ABSTRACTIONIST WHO’S INSPIRED BY LANDSCAPE, Joyce McCarten makes paintings in which gesture is just as important as color. The exuberant pictures in “At Home Everywhere,” a Studio Gallery show curated by the artist with Julie Sagatov and Dylan Price, are predominantly mixed-media and energized by scribbly lines and scrubby brushstrokes. “Cottonwood Canyon,” with its charcoal-like scrawls and underlying earth tones, even suggests a cave painting.

As that picture’s title indicates, McCarten sometimes names paintings after specific locations. But her depictions are more about sensations than recognizable sights. One of the most realistic ones, “Down in the Tulips,” is an immersive closeup rather than a sweeping panorama, and “First Glimpse of Mendocino” has a distinctively icy vibe that isn’t very Californian. “I travel to rattle my perspective,” the artist notes in her statement, and these paintings may shake the viewer’s perceptions as well.

About half of the paintings in Cheryl Ann Bearss’s “Whispers of the Woods” depict a single archetypal tree, gnarling upward until it twists out of the frame. These dynamic pictures are more realistic than impressionist, but they deliberately remove their subjects from their natural contexts, instead placing them against brooding black, gray, or brown backdrops. Each canvas is a one-tree drama.

Cheryl Ann Bearss, “Rooted” (Studio Gallery)

The show, downstairs at Studio Gallery and curated by Mira Hecht, also includes more naturalistic arboreal landscapes. In these, trees snuggle each other in groves or are secondary to rocky streams and lakes. But all nine pictures are strongly vertical, as if to celebrate the essential trajectory of trees. The human eye may naturally shift from side to side, but Bearss seeks to send it spiraling toward the highest branches.

In the month of 9/11’s 25th anniversary, Deborah Addison Coburn revisits some paintings she first exhibited 20 years. These pictures are the among most striking in the artist’s “Reflections of the Bluest Day,” which was curated by Gabby Mizes. But several more recent works in show, which adjoins Bearss’s, are equally potent.

The title painting, made in 2026, simply depicts two parallel tan horizontals at one side of a sky-colored field. More explicit are “Jacob’s Ladder,” a semi-abstract rendering of skeletal wreckage jutting upward, and “25 Years Later,” in which the red stripes on a U.S. flag, overlaid with chicken wire, drip bloodily. Other pictures are less pointed, but with hints of destruction and conflagration. Coburn constructs sturdy lines in the colors of steel and concrete yet imbues them with a sense of fragility.

Robert Cwiok’s orange-heavy collages, also at Studio and curated by the artist and Iza Thomas, might be described as semi-Cubist bagatelles. The artist assembles scraps of cut paper, most often in hard-edged, right-angled patterns that suggest principles of architecture and city planning. In fact, the background of “Petal Pin” is partly a map of the L’Enfant-Ellicott plan for central Washington, although the mostly blue pinwheel atop it is among these pictures’s more curvilinear forms. Text features in such pieces as “Art and Commerce,” which arrays the names of artists, filmmakers, actors, musicians, and such curators as onetime Washingtonian Walter Hopps. Cwiok’s collages may appear to be abstract exercises in form, but their details gleam with local color.

Michael Malpass, “Globe” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

A FUND-RAISING EVENT FOR IA&A AT HILLYER doubles as a quick overview of recent D.C. art. “Auction in the Alley” features 42 works by more 30 artists, most of them local. While many of the entries were made since 2020, there are callbacks to earlier eras, notably Tom Wolff’s poignant photographic portrait of masterly realist painter Manon Cleary, who died in 2011.

Among the other highlights are two early-1980s Michael Malpass sculptural assemblages. Both are imposing spheres made of scraps of black metal hardware, but one appears solid while the other is airy. (Malpass, who died in 1991, never lived in the D.C. area, but his work was included in the local Hechinger Collection of tool-related art.)

Many contributors offer pieces that are in their familiar modes, yet fresh. Among these are Ellyn Weiss’s fluid and atmospheric hybrids of drawing and stain painting; Abol Bahadori’s sleekly mysterious pictures of veiled woman on some sort of red planet; Helen Frederick’s elegantly glittering mixed-media drawing; and Joan Belmar’s stark yet lush abstractions, which combine etching, collage, and painting. More familiar, if no less impressive, are Sookkyung Park’s epic origami sculpture of a wave; Michèle Colburn’s abstract-floral watercolor atop gunpowder residue; and two eco-themed Taina Litwak text-infused collage-paintings, one of leaves and the other of birds.

Text also features in three other notable pieces. Chris Combs’s playful “Blurred Words” places a rough wooden frame around a one-line LED display that electronically spits trios of rhyming or near-rhyming words or phrases. Jun Lee, who makes exquisite large woodcuts of animals, pairs the phrase “All Power to the People” with the image of mighty feline. Kirsty Little embosses the word “pandemonium” so it appears to be submerged under an array of colored ribbons. It’s a gambit that exemplifies the show, which is full of art that’s tidy and well-crafted but with hints of anxiety beneath the surface.

Kristine DeNinno, “Madonna I” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

KRISTINE DENINNO HAS AN HOURGLASS FIGURE -- several of them, in fact -- in her Washington Printmakers Gallery exhibition, “At the Seams.” The suburban-Maryland artist makes large collographs and monoprints of streamlined female forms into which she stitches fiber darts and panels, thus invoking domestic *labor traditionally done by women. The goal is to craft “symbols of strength and resistance,” according to the artist’s statement.

Symbolism aside, DeNinno’s work is distinguished by exceptional skill, intriguing textural contrasts, and a distinctive palette. Bluish-green and brownish-purple dominate, often as watery tones but also as harder shapes, creases, or boundaries. Including the five smaller, older pieces on display in the back room, the show offers an absorbing overview of the artist’s style and motifs. The colors are muted, but the detailing is vivid.

Also at the gallery is Caryn Martin’s front-window installation, which arranges crumpled, blue-tinted paper both close to the glass and further back. The effect is fluid and immersive, suggesting an oceanic whirlpool frozen in space.

Nicole Fall, “Symbiosis” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

NATURE TAKES ABUNDANT FORMS, most of them three-dimensional, in “Natural Progressions,” a three-artist show at Glen Echo Park’s Popcorn Gallery. Janet B. Waters makes delicate mixed-media abstractions that hint at the natural world. Blake M. Conroy painstakingly cuts paper or metal into silhouetted vignettes of intricate foliage. The largest entries are by Nicole Fall, who builds on steel frames painted-clay sculptures of fanciful creatures.

The most realistic works are Conroy’s, two of which are densely multi-level, if far from literal. Waters’s color-conscious approach draws from nature’s complexity and fecundity but also expresses joy in her own materials. Fall invents her own miniature universe of fantastic beasts -- or are they plants? All three participants, who hail from D.C. and the Baltimore region, treat nature more as an inspiration than a specific model, a strategy that yields extravagant results.

Sarah Spector: Transcendent Terrains: Outer Landscapes and Inner Temples

Through Sept. 26 at Waverly Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Highway, Bethesda. waverlystreetgallery.com. 301-951-9441.

Joyce McCarten: At Home Everywhere

Deborah Addison Coburn: Reflections of the Bluest Day

Cheryl Ann Bearss: Whispers of the Woods

Robert Kwiok

Through Sept. 26 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734

Auction on the Alley

Through Sept. 24 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Court NW. athillyer.org. 202-338-0680.

Kristine DeNinno: At the Seams

Through Sept. 27 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

Janet B. Waters, Nicole Fall, and Blake M. Conroy: Natural Progressions

Through Sept. 27 at Popcorn and Stone Tower Galleries, Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. glenechopark.org/partnershipgalleries. 301-634-2222.

Foon Sham, “Fire” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

The upstairs artists’s studios are integral to the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington’s mission, yet don’t generally influence the main-floor exhibitions. But as part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the non-collecting contemporary art venue is showing work by some of the people who’ve inhabited the studios. Curated by Amanda Jirón-Murphy, “Material Matters: Works by Residency Alumni” offers diverse single pieces, mostly three-dimensional, by nine artists.

The most prominent is Foon Sham, who usually works with wood. “Fire” is one of the intriguingly craggy sculptures he makes by pouring molten iron into a hollow wooden form. The liquefied metal burns away much of the wood, leaving what’s left blackened and deformed. A partial wooden sleeve is added to the anti-monument later, as if to restore order after the random effects of the original process.

Other objects were fabricated with more control. Marissa Long’s “Precious” is an outsized bow, seemingly metallic but actually made of silver-painted acrylic. Also playfully deceptive is Negar Ahkami’s “The Persian Bowl: Laissez-Moi Danser,” a simulation of a 17th-century Persian ceramic bowl made of painted fabric -- and winkingly named for a 1979 Eurodisco hit. (A similar piece is included in the Phillips Collection’s current showcase of local artists.) Ryan McCoy’s precise model of a gas-pump nozzle was titled “Fountain” after Marcel Duchamp’s most notorious readymade, but was inspired by the United States’s latest assault on an oil-rich Mideast nation.

A fox presides over the most visually complex entry, Rachel Schmidt’s “Meadow Altar.” A sequence of primarily realistic drawings on wooden panels, some rectangular and the others shaped, the sculptural picture also incorporates hanging thread. Appropriating the format of a church altarpiece, the artist flanks an inviting meadow and mountain landscape with geometric patterns and a pair of rabbits. The piece is an invitation to enter, and perhaps even worship, the natural world.

Coincidentally, an altarpiece is also a feature of “Rude Screen,” a multi-media installation in one of MOCA’s basement galleries. The work of Philadelphia’s Crasis, the team of Andy P. Davis and Anne Lukins, the piece combines Christian iconography -- “rude” puns on “rood,” which means “crucifix” -- with environmental concerns. It includes video of Galveston’s beach, which is threatened by rising sea levels. The certainty of historic Christian faith is juxtaposed with a precarious physical universe.

Next door is Lou Haney’s “Window Dressing,” a set of colorful paintings of domestic interiors. The pictures are a bit surreal yet rooted in what the museum’s note describes as “the home-based craft traditions that acted as personal and economic outlets for generations of women.” The actuality of all that is represented by two paintings of curtained windows that are framed by genuine cloth curtains.

A different vision of everyday life is available upstairs in “Attention to Detail,” Rebecca Rivas Rogers’s set of paintings of objects from her studio. Made on a 1:1 scale, the 18 pictures are small and nearly abstract. The images are soft-edged and heavily painted, and rendered mostly in gray and black, but with some bright reds. Arrayed so that they’re almost dwarfed by expanses of white wall, the paintings look like tiny portals into a place that’s both strange and ordinary.

Stuart Gosswein, installation view (courtesy of the artist)

STUART GOSSWEIN’S EXHIBITION AT CARROLL SQUARE GALLERY is a one-man show, but it appears to be the result of multiple artists. Rather than document a unidirectional stylistic evolution, “Five Decades of Art” demonstrates a protean ability to vary modes, media, and motifs.

To be sure, there are recurring themes, notably visual autobiography. Nine of the 32 entries are partly or entirely titled “Self Portrait,” and Gosswein sometimes interjects himself into incongruous art-history contexts. One of the artist’s favorite paintings is Velasquez’s masterly portrait of Pope Innocent X, also an inspiration to British painter Francis Bacon. Gosswein’s renditions of Velasquez’s picture include some in which he stands in for the 17th-century pope. In a puckish interpolation, the artist wears a red hoodie instead of Innocent’s silky cap. (The National Gallery of Art owns a version of the papal portrait, which is credited to a follower of Velasquez but which Gosswein believes is by the great painter himself.)

Gosswein frequently depicts animals, notably horses, whether precisely or very loosely. “Statuesque Horses,” with its bold black lines and metallic tints, is particularly striking. Among the most detailed paintings is a upward-gazing view of the Federal Triangle, which is painstakingly realistic except for one thing: For the sake of the composition, the artist shifted the Washington Monument a few blocks east.

Although Gosswein estimates that 30 percent of the art he’s produced is abstract, this show emphasizes representational work. The influence of abstraction can be seen primarily in such freely painted pictures as the brushy “Three Sea Gulls” and a sketchy self-portrait made of black blotches on a blue field. “Six Apples” is modeled on a 13th-century Chinese ink painting, but its mottled background channels abstract expressionism. Injecting a hint of Jackson Pollock into a homage to ancient Chinese art may seem a brash move, but hardly as cheeky as Gosswein’s sitting himself in the place of a notable pope.

Kawanabe Kyosai, print from “Hyaku Monogatari”

RENAMED GODZILLA FOR THE OVERSEAS MARKET, Gojira was a new sort of monster to Western audiences. In Japan, however, the reptilian colossus was a nuclear-age update of yokai, nature-based creatures that have stalked the country’s imagination for millennia. Personifying fears that have dissipated as scientific knowledge advanced, yokai have become less threatening over time. Some of the fantastic beings depicted in the Japan Information and Culture Center’s “Yokai Parade: Supernatural Monsters from Japan” are kind of cute.

The traveling exhibition was organized by The Japan Foundation and curated by Yumoto Koichi, director emeritus of the Yumoto Koichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum (Miyoshi Mononoke Museum).

The show consists mostly of scrolls, prints, and manga, many from the Edo period (1600-1868) and nearly all of them replicas rather than originals. Also included are game pieces, anime stills, 1960s movie posters, and a selection of fans, toys, stickers, and key rings -- a tiny portion of the vast store of J-collectibles. The most mysterious items are reproductions of small yokai sculptures from an abandoned temple whose practices are lost to time.

Fans of ukiyo-e (”pictures of the floating world”) may recognize some prints from Kawanabe Kyosai’s “Hyaku Monogatari” (”100 tales”), which includes a vivid rendering of a often depicted yokai, a woman-headed snake. The most conceptually interesting of his prints portrays a demon whose head is incorporated into the form of a traditional Japanese lantern. Yokai were born out of darkness, but this one is a figment of light.

Rebecca J. White, “Birth of a Torii #21” (The Athenaeum)

A MORE SERENE JAPANESE TRADITION underlies Rebecca J. White’s paintings of torii, the gates that mark the entrance to Shinto shrines. An American artist who lived and studied art in Japan, White paints semi-abstract landscapes with a strong sense of place. Indeed, the titles of the pictures in her Athenaeum show, “Birth of a Torii,” identify their subjects as specific locations, most often on Kyushu, southernmost of the country’s four main islands. White’s paintings are hardly postcard views, however.

The artist depicts torii as distant and ethereal -- if usually bright red -- forms that emerge from environments often dominated by a single bold hue. The forests, buildings, or barely representational color fields are subtly marked with incised motifs. The artist has worked as an electronic technician, and so these designs resemble circuit boards and electrical diagrams. To the Shinto idea of a universe alive with animist spirits, White adds the sense of the world as a vast machine.

The pictures include a few views of bustling urban areas that are more secular than spiritual. But most portray rustic areas with strong vertical lines as upright as tree trunks or bamboo stalks. While most torii serve as entry ways to sacred buildings, a Shinto shrine can simply be a natural feature, notably a mountain. Thus it’s fitting that White’s gates both frame and are framed by green regions in which no other structures are visible. As a wooden torii leads into nature, White’s painted torii lead the eye into a realm of color and pattern.

Debra Perkins, “Serenity” series (photo by Mark Jenkins)

COLOR ANNOUNCES DEBRA PERKINS’S PAINTINGS, but a second look reveals that texture is just as central to her minimalist abstractions. The pictures in the D.C. artist’s Touchstone Gallery show, “Happenstance,” are all in series that work subtle variations on hue and form. Most of the paintings are square and all feature surfaces that are multi-layered or somehow worked.

Each of the “Serenity” paintings is a single bold color whose density is varied by raked patterns. The “Serendipity” set consists of dark-hued grounds with slab-like white forms arrayed above the base level, suggesting multi-colored stone. The “Daydream” collage-paintings are the chunkiest, with touches of red and blue amid the primarily black-and-white compositions. Most active, aptly, are the “Kinetic Energy” pictures, in which rune-like black scrawls dance on smeary gray-white fields. The sense of motion in all these works is a testament to the artist’s lingering presence, and a compelling human touch in paintings that might otherwise feel austere.

Material Matters: Works by Residency Alumni

Crasis: Rude Screen

Lou Haney: Window Dressing

Rebecca Rivas Rogers: Attention to Detail

Through Sept. 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, 3550 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. 703-248-6800.

Stuart Gosswein: Five Decades of Art

Through Sept. 26 at Carroll Square Gallery, 975 F St. NW; 202-234-5601; www.carrollsquare.com

Yokai Parade: Supernatural Monsters from Japan

Through Sept. 18 at Japan Information and Culture Center, 1150 18th St. NW. us-emb-japan.go.jp/jicc. 202-238-6900.

Rebecca J. White: Birth of a Torii

Through Sept. 13 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria. nvfaa.org. 703-548-0035.

Debra Perkins: Happenstance

Through Sept. 20 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.

Kei Ito, “Sungazing Scroll” (Phillips Collection)

MOST OF THE 56 WORKS in “Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise: The Phillips Collection Juried Exhibition” are not explicitly political. But the impetus for the show is revealed by one of its requirements for participating artists: that their work date from after November 2020, the month Americans learned that Donald Trump would return to the White House. The introductory wall text says nothing about this, but it does begin with lines from a defiantly hopeful samba Chico Buarque wrote while enduring Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

The show, curated by Tie Jojima and Tsedaye Makonnen, drew submissions from 1,500 Washington-Baltimore artists. The organizers selected 48 participants, about half of whom are often shown in D.C. galleries, with multiple pieces chosen by a few of them. The contributions were divided into five themes -- gazing, archiving, challenging, processing, and experimenting -- that are flexible enough to encompass video, photography, textile pieces, and a soundscape. There are even a few paintings.

In his remarks at the press preview, museum director Jonathan P. Binstock said that the show continues the Phillips’s original dedication to living artists. But the selection demonstrates how much art -- and the Washington area -- has changed since Duncan Phillips’s day. Where the Phillips originally collected art by Europeans and European-influenced Americans, “Tomorrow” includes work by participants rooted in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Most of it has little to do with the museum’s founding aesthetic.

Thus one of the show’s highlights -- and one of five pieces from the show that the museum has acquired -- is Kei Ito’s “Sungazing Scroll,” the Baltimore artist’s latest meditation on his grandfather’s survival of the A-bombing of Hiroshima. The eerie orange-and-black photogram consists of 108 panels, a number derived from Buddhism’s teaching that 108 worldly desires must be overcome to achieve enlightenment.

Non-Euro culture and personal identity are common motifs. Quezon City-born Thea Canlas offers four hanging miniature brooms wrapped in a human hair, which is widely exported from the Philippines. Alexandra Chiou’s wispy 3D collage-painting was inspired by a trip to Taiwan, her father’s birthplace. Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee’s engraved aluminum panel is based on postcards that reminded her of Hong Kong. The backdrop of Nami Oshiro’s primary-colors portrait of a woman is a traditional Okinawan pattern. Two paintings by Paloma Vianey in her trademark style depict her native Mexico within the confines of a partly zipped jacket. Negar Ahkami uses painted fabric to simulate Persian ceramics.

Gail Shaw-Clemons, “Shorthand Revisted” (Phillips Collection)

Several pieces are parables of oppression. Savannah Faith Jackson’s curtain-flanked ocean video evokes the middle passage of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Mojdeh Rezaeipour’s video installation was inspired by women’s protests in Iran. Adam Chamy’s small paintings on pages from a Orientalist Victorian adventure novel attempt to reclaim his Palestinian heritage. In Aynex Mercado’s fiber picture, a submerged Statue of Liberty struggles to survive a devastating storm.

While Gail Shaw-Clemons’s 12-panel sculptural collage-print is a tribute to her mother’s work as an IRS clerk-typist, its brilliant hues and precise forms place it in the older Phillips tradition. Also formally powerful are Mary Early’s veil of fragrant beeswax bars, strung together and hung in closely positioned vertical strands, and Alexandra Silverthone’s photograph of interlocking New Orleans trees, a picture softened by submersion in Mississippi River water. The latter is, of course, not purely imagistic; it’s also a warning about climate change.

Ironically, the entry that is most directly connected to the Phillips is Ringo Lisko’s text piece, whose letters were painstakingly written with dust and debris collected at the museum. The resulting banner, stark and minimalist, could hardly be less like the colorful paintings for which the Phillips is known. But it neatly represents contemporary practitioners’s desire to commune, however humbly, with an institution that helped shape American visual culture.

Marlo Pascual, “Untitled” (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

ALTHOUGH TRAINED AS A PHOTOGRAPHER, Marlo Pascual ultimately came to make pictures by remaking existing pictures. The artist is sometimes grouped as a member of the “pictures generation” -- alongside Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Sherrie Levine -- but she pushed toward sculpture in her later work. Several of the pieces in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’s “Making Something out of Something” incorporate found objects or minimalist 3D wooden elements.

Pascual lived just 47 years, dying of cancer in 2020. The 17 untitled artworks in this show were made between 2009 and 2014 and are from the museum’s permanent collection, having been donated by Tony Podesta or Heather and Tony Podesta. All are based on photographs Pascual found or purchased, and most begin with bland black-and-white images of the faces of unknown women.

Many of these faces have been sliced, shattered as if made of glass, or overlaid with a second picture that seems to lessen the importance of the countenance. The show’s central gallery offers eight variations on the same portrait, upstaged by such prosaic things as celery, ducks on water, or a spider in its web. A second room contains large photos, also of faces, that have been cut or torn apart. The pieces are reassembled or juxtaposed in ways that emphasize the rupture. One picture looks like a yearbook photo of a young woman; the top third of her head has been ripped from the rest and placed upside down adjacent to the rest.

The final gallery contains the sculptural pieces, two of which forgo faces for other body parts, such as clothed leg and a hand with a finger that points to black board that’s titled against the wall and leaning against the photo. The leg connects to the other work, since it’s one of the images superimposed on that portrait given eight different contrasting overlays.

It’s easy to see Pascual’s work as a commentary on the objectification of women, especially when she places such everyday domestic items as an illuminated lamp squarely atop the image of a woman’s face. But in interviews the artist stressed her interest not in social commentary but in disrupting staged, artificial photos and activating them with various tactics. Cleaving an old photo was a means of opening it up to new life.

Tomorrow the Sun Will Rise: The Phillips Collection Juried Exhibition

Through Sept. 20 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. phillipscollection.org. 202-387-2151.

Marlo Pascual: Making Something out of Something

Through Feb. 28 at National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. nmwa.org. 202-783-5000.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emon Surakitkoson, untitled (photo by Mark Jenkins)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bran Cherie, “Exposure” (Vika Gallery)

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

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

Sculpture Now

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

Present Imperfection

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

Emon Surakitkoson: The Joy of Simplicity

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

Marilyn Gates-Davis: Where We Once Belonged

Through Sept. 27 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda. amykaslowgallery.com.

Vugar Guliyev: Echoes of Solitude

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

Bran Cherie: Metamorphosis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misuzu Fukeda, “Head” (Washington Studio School)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jake Muirhead, “Persona” (Washington Printmakers Gallery)

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Casqueiro: Counterspace

Sunanda Khajuria: Beyond Borders: Who I Am Between Houses

Mona Bozorgi: Threading the Gaze

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

Progression

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

Yumiko Glover and Misuzu Fukeda: Hiroshima Revisited

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

Focus Group 5

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

2026 Peggy Doole National Small Works Exhibition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia Nassikas: From the Cellular to the Celestial

Joseph Cortina: CREST + HOLLOW

Subtle Connections: Works by David Carlson

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

Fifty: A Community Memoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crosshatch: Making Networks

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

Superimposed

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

Rip! Tear! Collage as Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghost in the Machine: Works by Timothy Makepeace

Susan Goldman: Prima Vista

Richard Dana: People, Places, and Otherwise

A. Brockie Stevenson: An American Vision

Bonnie Lautenberg: ARTISTICA! Where Hollywood Meets Art History

Gail Rebhan: What Questions Do We Ask?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Janis Goodman: Coastal Reverie

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

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

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

Tao Ya-Lun: Ubiquitous Ghosts

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

Beyond Your Boundaries

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

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

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

Power of Place: Arts and the Semi-Quincentennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glitchscape

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

Bob Burgess: Encounters

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

America 250

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

Story Cloths and the Book: Work by New Image Artists

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

Wayson R. Jones: The Full Moon Is My Girlfriend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Anderson, “Gerrymandering” (Amy Kaslow Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

Chromatic Scales

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

WOW 12

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

Lesley Clarke: Echoes of Place

Anice Hoachlander: Nature as Architect

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

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

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

Seeing in Black and White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Rose: Street Markets: Relief Prints and Reduction Screenprints

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

Bethesda Painting Awards

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

Rick Bach: Cut

Tara Youngborg: Abandonware [houses]

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

Noël Kassewitz: What Remains

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

New Members Showcase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Myoda: Poly-Perspectives

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

Robin Croft: A Concise Retrospective

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

Fred Zafran: Just Passing Through

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

John Thomas Paradiso: Sexual Tensions: Nightmares and Daydreams

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

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

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

Willem De Looper: Evolution of an Artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

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