“Starting: Works on Paper 1967–1970” was a rare chance to see sixteen of Sam Gilliam’s early, never-before-exhibited works, shown alongside a typeset poem, ca. 1965. Each piece was small in size and expansive in metaphoric scale. The palette ranged from deep and muddy in the 1967 “Rock Creek” series to full-on electric in others. Untitled, 1968, seemed to figure an aurora borealis in an already Technicolor sky, its expansiveness belied by the modest physical dimensions of the vertical page. The overlapping splatters of blue, brown, and yellow in “Rock Creek,” especially in Untitled, 1967, were

A poet of the everyday, Haim Steinbach has been resituating consumer and handcrafted objects on individualized laminated-shelf constructions for some forty years. Akin to Gertrude Stein’s poetry (repetitive, surprising, full of precisely calibrated connotations), Steinbach’s sculptural syntax remains relevant in its capacities to filter and compress the sensory data of the contemporary world. In his most recent works, that syntax is literally vocalized: The artist has added voice-activated devices—Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s and Harman Kardon’s smart speakers—to the dog Kongs and thrift-store tchotchkes

The lanky ladies in Alexa Guariglia’s paintings hover in swirling blossoms of color, caught either in the act of artmaking or aswim in paper or water. Their lithe contours seem to have been recorded with a single swipe of the artist’s brush, as in the elongated bodies of illustrated fashion models. Ensconced in writhing vegetation and clad in frenetic patterns, the figures look wholly lost in their own worlds: Stacks of canvases brick in their makers; arms knead a misshapen hunk of clay; faces bend toward paintings as if entranced by magical mirrors. The portraits’ easy lyricism and diaphanous

Willie Stewart was two years old when the Cure’s “In Between Days” was released. The song is an earworm that can get you to dance to dour lyrics: “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die.” Stewart took this former nightclub staple as the title of his recent solo exhibition, which, like the band’s music, was austere, showy, and well-crafted, more thoughtful than its slick finishes suggested.

Stewart, who is also a musician, used the arena of arty punk and synth bands from the 1980s to explore layered notions of time, in an era when any decade’s records are instantly streamable. A sense of