Saturday: Liz Phair at the Anthem

Thirty years ago, Liz Phair released her debut, Exile in Guyville, loosely conceived as a track-by-track feminist response to the rock machismo of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 record Exile on Main Street. We live in a postmodern era of constant remakes, reboots, and revivals, but Phair’s lo-fi Exile was nothing less than a revelatory and renegade album. Bold, brazen, and bawdy, Phair’s girl-next-door looks belied the darkness and candor of her lyrics. Sonically, she sounded more like her acoustic singer-songwriter Lilith Fair cohorts, but the sexual bravado and utter angst of her lyrics also aligned her with the third-wave feminism of the riot grrrl movement. In the album’s opener, “6’1″,” she has all the swagger of Mick Jagger, as she squares off with an ex. But in other tracks across the 55-minute record, the facade of a sexually liberated, nonchalant cool chick dissolves, and we uncover much more complex characters. In “Fuck and Run,” she laments “I want a boyfriend,” after another unfulfilling one-night stand in a long history of dating disasters (with a gut-punch last line); a road trip dissolves an unhappy marriage in “Divorce Song,” and in “Strange Loop,” love is just not enough. Musically, the album is pretty no-frills DIY indie, but there are still sonic surprises—the bluesy heartbreaker “Dance of the Seven Veils,” the swirling guitar and echoing chorus of the album’s solo radio release “Never Said Nothing,” the 2.5 minutes of plucky acoustic guitar and slowly emerging static before the first plaintive vocals of “Shatter,” and the sacrilegious hymnal “Flower” with a choir of angelic voices joining Phair’s deadpan list of “impure, unchaste” sexual fantasies. Exile in Guyville was an immediate critical success and is still extolled on Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums of all time and 100 best albums of the ’90s lists, as well as Pitchfork’s top 100 albums of the ’90s, among others. In 2018, Matador Records reissued the album and released a deluxe box set titled Girly-Sound to Guyville, covering Phair’s early cassette-recorded demos preceding her monumental debut. In the past few years, Phair released her seventh studio album, Soberish, in 2021 and a starkly candid memoir, Horror Stories (2019). Blondshell, highlighted as a City Paper Fall Arts Guide pick, open the show with “new shade of rage meets sarcastic grunge.” Liz Phair performs her album Exile in Guyville after Blondshell open at 8 p.m on Nov. 25 at the Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. Seated show. theanthemdc.com. $55–$95. —Colleen Kennedy

Now Open: Dorothea Lange: Seeing People at the National Gallery of Art

Few photographers are as closely defined by one image as Dorothea Lange is by her Depression-era portrait “Migrant Mother.” But that image is only a pivot point for the National Gallery of Art’s retrospective of work by Lange (1895-1965). In her early years, Lange sometimes produced ghostly, blurred portraits, but in the 1920s, her decades-long penchant for socially charged realism emerged, initially in piercing images of Indigenous people, including a Hopi man and a Mexican American child. Lange proved skillful at capturing crowds, including labor rallies and bread lines, as well as individuals and small groups with pained faces, including a family of drought refugees from Oklahoma and a farmer from Missouri sitting with his wife in their car. While Lange’s images largely fit within the era’s straightforward documentary approach, a few break fruitfully with that style, notably a 1935 image of three Mexican American farm workers set against a blinding white sky, decades before this approach was adopted by Richard Avedon. One image from 1942 is particularly poignant: It shows a grocery store in Oakland, California, owned by a family of Japanese ancestry who put up a sign saying in bold letters, “I AM AN AMERICAN.” It didn’t help; the family was sent to an internment camp, and, once released, they never returned to Oakland. The curators deserve credit for charting the limitations of Lange’s work, particularly in an image of a Southern country store with several White and Black men standing and seated on the porch; the wall caption emphasizes the uncertainty about whether the men’s seeming harmony in the image is genuine or simply a show for the camera. The exhibit also offers a melancholy postscript to Lange’s most celebrated photograph: The subject of “Migrant Mother” appears to have received no financial benefit despite becoming a worldwide icon. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People runs through March 31 at the National Gallery of Art, 6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. nga.gov. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Wednesday: Modern Evergreen Wreath via Zoom

D.C. artist Arrin Sutliff is known for her distinctive, romantic, and wild floral arrangements. Her lively designs—which are perhaps more accurately described as textured, flower-filled living sculptures—capture the whimsy of nature and are sourced from seasonal, native shrubs and plants. In an upcoming virtual workshop with the Smithsonian as part of their holiday-themed, hands-on programming, Sutliff will demonstrate how attendees can create modern, artistic wreaths with festive (and even foraged!) evergreens and any other leafy finds that strike their creative fancy. Open to decoration lovers and green thumb owners of any expertise, the class covers Sutliff’s versatile wiring technique, which can also be used to create garlands or art nouveau bouquets; thoughtful gifts and plastic-free, sustainable, and subtly sublime holiday decor. If you’re in the mood for more natural crafts to celebrate (or decompress) this season, there is also a workshop on creating flower arrangements out of crepe paper so you can add a few more blossoms to your holiday tableaus that will last through the new year. Also on offer, storied orchid connoisseur Barb Schmidt will lead another workshop on the cosmopolitan plant that includes a whole festival of floral fun: orchid trivia, orchid care, orchid history, orchid arrangement—everything but a partridge in a pear tree. The Modern Evergreen Wreath starts at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 29 and Dec. 5. Crepe Paper Flowers—Paperwhites starts at 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Orchids for the Holidays starts at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 5 All workshops will be held on Zoom; register online. smithsonianassociates.org. $30—$85. —Emma Francois

Through Dec. 10: Timeless 2023 at Photoworks

For photography geeks like me, it almost doesn’t matter what the subject matter is when archaic techniques are in play. That’s the case with Timeless 2023: A Contemporary Look at Handmade Photographic Processes at Photoworks at Glen Echo Park, in which nine photographers contribute new works made using old formats. Mac Cosgrove–Davies offers a range of small images, notably a number made with the gum bichromate process, which was developed in 1859, less than two decades after the birth of photography. His images, as well other gum bichromate prints by Christopher Gumm, offer soft-focus renderings of the natural and built environment using a primitive but appealing color palette. (Gumm’s postcard-style images of a wooded landscape and the U.S. Capitol are inspired.) Another commonly used method in the exhibit is the cyanotype, which as its name suggests, is often (but not necessarily) blue. Rachael van der Linden uses the cyanotype process to document a trip to the beach, most effectively when the details she sees are at their most abstract. Colin Gore, meanwhile, uses it to capture patterns of repeated parallel lines, while Paige Billin–Frye manipulates the toning of her wide landscapes through ingredients such as yerba mate tea and grape leaves, producing a compelling image of a multicolored row of drying laundry hung amid a largely colorless sweep of grass and trees. The unsung stars of the show are Billin-Frye’s manhole covers, whose classic, textured surfaces pair surprisingly well with the relatively lo-fi cyanotype process. Timeless 2023 runs through Dec. 10 at Photoworks at Glen Echo Park, 7300 Macarthur Blvd., Glen Echo. Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. glenechophotoworks.org. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Thru Jan. 25: Mastery and Milestones at Leica Store 

For its 11th anniversary, the D.C. outpost of the Leica camera store is mounting a retrospective exhibit of work by D.C.-area photographers. It doesn’t include any blockbuster images, but the work—a mix of black-and-white and color photographs—is consistently strong. Appropriately, about two-thirds of the images feature D.C.-area residents. They include political marches downtown (images of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests by Tony Mobley and Cheriss May, and an antiabortion rally by Chaz Neil); U Street NW soul food restaurant Oohhs & Aahhs by John Buckley; a Marine and his bride getting married at the Lincoln Memorial by Chuck Kennedy; the presentation of Mr. and Ms. UDC by May; and an image by Amitava Chatterjee of a seated museumgoer at the National Gallery of Art as he ignores several nude paintings in favor of his reading material. Street images by Chatterjee and Randy Blythe serve as reminders of how an aptly timed photograph of strangers in public can offer an intriguing mix of simultaneous, split-second facial expressions. Further afield, on the Montana prairie, Tim Hyde offers a long-distance landscape that features isolated trees, a large cross, and a flagpole under a dusky blue cloud front. The work photographers may most identify with, however, is Kyle Myles’ image of a skateboarder captured in midair at our very own Freedom Plaza; the dramatic freeze-frame is undercut by an unwelcome backdrop, a Don’s Johns porta-potty. Mastery and Milestones runs through Jan. 25 at Leica Store D.C., 977 F St. NW. Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to  6 p.m.; Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. leicacamerausa.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson