The American University Museum has outdone itself this spring, mounting no fewer than seven exhibits at once. The Very Idea! Art of Brian Kavanagh features paintings by the late Washington artist, including an inspired, end-of-career series of small paintings focused on death and nestled within stately wood frames. The Tree Around the Corner features vibrantly colored paintings of trees by Barbara Kerne; The Human Flood offers meditations on the impact of climate change; and New Perspective on the New Thing documents a late-1960s project to provide Black youth with a space for artistic exploration in Adams Morgan. Three other exhibits stand out. The most solemn is Art and the Demands of Memory, which features descendants of Holocaust survivors who’ve used art to grapple with their family trauma, including somber black-and-white photographs by Coos Hamburger (in Jerusalem) and Michael Steiner Borek (in the Czech Republic), along with meditative sculptural works by Miriam Mörsel Nathan (boxes that evoke the ones for transporting human remains at the Terezin concentration camp) and Dalya Luttwak (metal roots that serve as a metaphor for family and survival). The quirkiest exhibit, however, is A Drawing Like No Other, which documents Billy Pappas’ eight-year quest to hand-copy a 1957 Richard Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe, requiring Pappas to make some 9 million pencil marks. The biggest surprise is that Pappas’ piece de resistance is no expansive Linn Meyers-esque wall-spanning project but rather barely a foot wide, overpowering more in concept and sweat than scale. The standout exhibit of the seven may be Dana Hart-Stone: Kaleidoscope, which features monumental acrylic ink on canvas works based on vintage snapshots, many of them from the American West, Hart-Stone’s native region. Hart-Stone uses these snapshots as building blocks for either rectangular, filmstrip-like accretions or even brasher circular canvases that nest more than a dozen layers of identical, spiraling photographs within them, suggesting the flickering movement of a zoetrope. The Very Idea! and New Perspective on The New Thing run through March 17; The Tree Around the Corner runs through May 10; while Kaleidoscope, A Drawing Like No Other, and Art and the Demands of Memory run through May 19; lastly, The Human Flood, runs through Aug. 13 at the American University Museum. american.edu/cas/museum. Free. —Louis Jacobson
Spring at the Katzen Arts Center, open through March 17, May 10 and 19, and Aug. 13
