“I heard her voice, dry as my own, thin, high, and in her nose, with the old outdoors and down the mountain sound to it,” wrote Woody Guthrie in 1947. “Singing to us as she had sung into the rifle fire of Sheriff Blair’s deputies, Sarah Ogan got the house of people to keep so still that the cat licking his hair sounded like a broomstick rubbed against a washtub.” Sarah Ogan Gunning was the daughter and wife (and, no surprise, widow) of coal miners from Kentucky. She first gained fame as a singer-songwriter and activist for mine workers’ rights in the 1930s. Templates for the work of Loretta

In her second solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Terri Friedman continued her exploration of fluidity as subject matter, subtext, and material property in a group of new paintings in transparent or translucent acrylic poured onto Plexiglas surfaces. Friedman’s paintings descend from unusual precursors: Janet Sobel and Knud Merrild, who, in 1940s New York and Los Angeles, respectively, prefigured action-oriented uses of liquid paint media with more delicate experiments in mingling and controlling the movement of the material.

Like Merrild’s “flux” paintings, Friedman’s pictures deal in swirling