Saturday and Sunday: The 14th Annual Washington Women in Jazz Festival

Though the 14th annual Washington Women in Jazz Festival has already hosted multiple events this March, it is closing out the month with a hopping, final weekend. Saturday starts off with a live recording of the Washington Women in Jazz podcast the Turnaround and a celebration of the second issue of fanzine of the same name. Local jazz singer and professor Jessica Boykin–Settles, the guest editor of the Turnaround’s latest print issue, will be interviewing singer and storyteller Dr. Karen Wilson–Ama’Echefu. Saturday will also include two concerts—one where Boykin-Settles, known for applying her warm vocals to 20th century-rooted swinging arrangements of jazz standards, civil rights theme compositions, and recent R&B hits, will perform. Saxophonist Sarah Hughes will follow with a solo show. Hughes is heralded for her experimental and improvisational approach that mixes noisy, rapid-fire squawking with some quieter, more tuneful notes. Sunday’s lineup will include a talk by University of Maryland assistant ethnomusicology professor Kelsey Klotz on the jazz patriarchy, as well as an album release concert by Leigh Pilzer’s Seven Pointed Star. That group, with festival founder Amy K. Bormet on piano, and Pilzer on baritone sax and bass clarinet, will be playing tuneful brass-led selections from their new album, Beatin’ the Odds. Both busy days will include workshops by participating musicians on how to play jazz and close with jam sessions led by drummer Angel Bethea and featuring Bormet. Women in Jazz Festival begins at noon on March 30 and March 31 at the National League of American Pen Women, 1300 17th St. NW. strangewomanrecords.com. $10–$99. —Steve Kiviat   

Now Open: Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Art

When it comes to earning respect from museums and other artistic institutions, pity the artisan or craftworker. Textile and fiber arts have long been relegated to the realm of glitter glue or home ec class, considered to be too crafty or utilitarian to qualify as fine art even when a verified fine artist dabbles in those fields. The truth is, the boundary between functional and high art is fuzzier than a chenille blanket, a point that is well demonstrated in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibit collects examples of clothing, rugs and tapestries, embroidery, and basketmaking, as well as paintings, prints, and sculptures that are inspired by the forms that underlie weaving and sewing—turns out the warp and weft loom structure lends itself quite well to geometric abstraction and gridded artworks. Multiple artists in this exhibit worked across disciplines and the commercial and fine arts. A Ruth Asawa wire sculpture that employs looping techniques similar to knitting hovers in the center of a room near two of the artist’s ink works, one that looks like a rib knit and one that bears a pattern similar to a repeat on a bolt of fabric. Hannah Höch was best known for her Dada photomontages, but Woven Histories touches on her early work as a pattern maker, and several of her collages hang here, including one bordered with zippers and snaps. (Anything in the realm of textile tends to be regarded as “women’s work,” and women artists are therefore very well represented here.) The show also serves as an interesting display of the evolution of textile production, starting with purely handmade techniques before exploring the seemingly miraculous advent of factories and mass production and investigating the negative consequences of this manufacturing. Carol Frances Lung’s nearly five-hour-long video, “Frau Fiber vs. the Circular Knitting Machine,” features the artist kitting a single tube sock while on the factory floor behind her a machine cranks out 99 pairs. There’s such an impressive range of techniques and textures on display—plasticky body armor, felted wool gowns, metallic-threaded tapestries, furry sculptures, silky flags, thorny baskets—that it can be hard to resist the “no touching” rule. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction runs through July 28 at National Gallery of Art, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. nga.gov. Free. —Stephanie Rudig 

Ongoing: Seen Better Times at Multiple Exposures Gallery

Don’t waste my time with ruin porn, writes Michael Borek in his juror statement for the exhibition Seen Better Times at Multiple Exposures Gallery. Photographing peeling walls and decay eventually becomes “a bit boring, because there is nothing more behind the surface,” Borek writes. Nonetheless, some of the images Borek selected do dabble in tumbledown scenery, including Eric Johnson’s photograph of the exterior of a run-down theater, Sarah Hood Salomon’s image of a building being gutted, Sandy LeBrun–Evans’ Cuban streetscape featuring a broken-down jalopy and a young child, and Matt Leedham’s photograph of a broken TV deposited by an elevator in a run-down apartment building. A few other contributors take the riskier approach of applying the theme of decline to people, including a Maureen Minehan image of two men standing on opposite corners of an urban intersection and Fred Zafran’s photograph of two men of a certain age conversing street-side. But the exhibit’s most notable works are those that veer in a different direction. Two contributors succeed through abstraction: Alan Sislen with a door that has devolved into multiple layers of fading paint and Francine B. Livaditis with a constructivist assemblage of boldly hued pieces of metal in a boneyard. Meanwhile, an image by Zafran offers a tableau worthy of Gregory Crewdson, in which a man in an old-timey diner wipes his mouth as a waitress behind the counter stares into the unseen distance. A thematic counterpoint, though, is Soomin Ham’s understated black-and-white image of a ladder leaning against a wall and rising into a tree-ringed sky. If the rest of the exhibit dwells on deterioration, Ham’s photograph seems to offer a literal escape. Seen Better Times runs through April 7 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Ongoing: Prina Shah at Morton Fine Art

When I first received an email announcing The Unseen, the solo exhibit of Prina Shah’s art at Morton Fine Art, I could have sworn they were textiles. Only upon seeing them in person did I discover that Shah’s circular works were actually acrylic-on-canvas paintings. But that doesn’t begin to describe their full effect. Other artists have created circle-theme paintings before—famously Jasper Johns, less famously Mary Weatherford—and a few recent artists on view in D.C. have used the circle as a structuring device, including Adrienne Moumin at the District Architecture Center and Dana Hart–Stone at the American University Museum. But none mirrors the approach of Shah, a Kenyan native of Indian ancestry who continues to work from Nairobi. Shah’s paintings are most concisely described as multilayered; a typical work will begin with an underlying coat of black paint, topped by a slow, centripetal spiral made of varying colors, and finally topped by a mantra—an indecipherable white script applied using a henna cone. Each work features a void in the center, forming a shape that suggests anything from a vinyl LP to a representation of the sun. Shah also experiments with monochromatic pencil-based works as well as ink on paper, but the multidimensional layering of her paintings stands out. When seen from a distance, Shah’s paintings show subtle variability; “I Am” comes off as a shade of red, “I Know” as a shade of purple, “I Love” as a shade of green, and “I Do” as a shade of orange. Ultimately, their granular building blocks resolve into a pleasingly unified whole. Prina Shah’ The Unseen runs through April 17 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW. Tuesday through Saturday by appointment. mortonfineart.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson