Door slamming is the ultimate stage exit, often used by emotionally wrought female characters who’ve run out of lines and yet still have something to say, like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. This international group show of both men and women—seventeen individual artists plus one duo—seems to celebrate not only the histrionics of this wordless gesture but also the complexity associated with those members of the “fairer sex” who choose to go out with a bang instead of a whimper. And how does that translate into art? The thirty-one works on display combine dramatic appearance with great attention

To historicize and culturally process authoritarian thinking can be seen as a form of mimesis—a therapeutic enterprise that provides the means to transfigure pain into amusement through representation. But the remedy may also be the poison—an ambiguity captured in the Greek word pharmakon, and a notion that should be kept firmly in mind when considering the imagery exhibited in “Art and Propaganda: Clash of Nations 1930–1945,” which surveys the phenomenon as it was manifested in the United States, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The exhibition was divided into four sections: the image of