Bartone is a Georgia-based artist who teaches printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He employs various methods, including woodcut, intaglio and lithography, with equal assurance. One of his prints took first prize in last year’s Peggy Doole National Small Works Competition, whose winner is awarded a solo show at Washington Printmakers Gallery.

Nature is central in these prints, all of which are black-and-white save for the gold-kissed “Let the Sun Cast a Spell on the Sky,” in which flowers and a fluttering insect flourish beneath a fiery, low-slung orb. Some of the simpler pictures depict only plants and animals, but there’s almost always a human presence in the background, whether a lone farmhouse or a large city. In “Trillium,” Bartone’s prizewinning lithograph, leaves and moths frame a distant structure that looks like a refinery or a chemical plant.

One of the most complex visions is “Divining,” which foregrounds fruit, a snail and a butterfly before receding through a cornfield toward a thicket of skyscrapers and finally the mountains that tower over them. The elements are portrayed naturalistically, yet a set of columns and arches on one side gives the scene a theatrical quality.

A central theme is the “battle between stewardship and overconsumption,” according to the artist’s statement. Bartone includes such ominous ecological consequences as the cracked earth of “Dustbowl,” and tornado-spawned funnel clouds spin threateningly through several pictures. Yet reverence for nature doesn’t prevent the artist from acknowledging mankind’s dominion. The places Bartone illustrates are not wildernesses but agricultural zones, with urban or industrial areas usually nearby. And, as the stage-set border in “Divining” indicates, people control not only how land is used but also how it’s seen.

In the Drift: Recent Prints by Curtis Bartone Through July 28 at Washington Printmakers Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave NW. washingtonprintmakers.com. 202-669-1497.

The two exhibitions at the Mansion at Strathmore express contrasting meanings of worldliness. Mixed-media artist Eileen Martin employs various formats, but many of the pieces in her “Thinking Globally” feature planetlike orbs. “Translation Through Art,” curated by Thai-born local painter Emon Surakitkoson, offers pieces by 25 Asian American and Pacific Islander artists.

Martin works primarily, though not exclusively, with glass, metal and found objects. Her beautifully crafted stained- or fused-glass creations feature religious scenes or abstracted nature imagery such as cascading water. The local artist’s concern with the natural world can be expressed playfully, as in a gray ceramic teapot that takes the shape of a whale or dolphin. But Martin’s style is not always gentle: Other ingredients include barbed wire and a model handgun cast in pewter.

Spherical forms defined by open lattices suggest cages, while solid ones evoke the Earth. The globes can appear light, or as heavy as the two concrete half-orbs of “God Save the Press,” whose weight threatens to crush lead type-forms left over from an obsolete form of newspaper printing. A ring of consumer trash orbits Earth in “Space Junk,” and a sphere made of repurposed eyeglasses encloses the planet in “Looking Out.” More open visually yet just as trapped thematically is a sculpture in which a cuffed hand, clutching some fentanyl, is imprisoned within a circular cell of copper tubing. Martin’s spherical forms yield elegant compositions, but what’s inside the globe is often messy and disturbing.

The works in “Translation Through Art” are as diverse as the various artists’ heritages. Some of the contributors depict American places or things: Yoshika Greene rips multiple photos of Baltimore street scenes and stitches the pieces together with actual thread, while photorealist Samantha Van Heest paints a gold sweatshirt that pirouettes on a white backdrop. Others recall former or ancestral homelands: Nam Ko inscribes a Chinese landscape in blue on a large white porcelain vessel, and Yerkezhan Abuova portrays an eerily abandoned village, perhaps in Kazakhstan, overgrown with moss that seems to have also tinted two faces partly green.

Among the highlights are metal sculptures by Jean Jinho Kim and layered paper collages by Shanye Huang, both of whose work have been reviewed in this column previously. Equally notable are Shyama Kuver’s drawing-paintings of blue-faced women, in which the artist effectively contrasts opaque and watery pigment. Rather than denote a particular country, these portraits evoke a land of myth.

Eileen Martin: Thinking Globally and Translation Through Art Through July 27 at the Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. strathmore.org. 301-581-5109.

Offhand and archetypal at the same time, the late Raya Bodnarchuk’s artworks closely observe and affectionately celebrate daily life. The local artist and longtime teacher (who lived from 1947 to 2021) counseled her students to “do something you love every day,” advice that serves as the title of a commemorative show at Gallery Neptune & Brown.

From 2013 to 2019, Bodnarchuk made a small picture each day, beginning with drawings that later evolved into a series of more than 1,900 gouache paintings. These are mostly bright-hued studies of nature as it manifests in the Maryland suburbs: moons, flowers, leaves, trees and many sorts of domestic and not-very-wild animals. Some of the 200 examples on display are rendered in simple outlines, but others are modeled and shadowed realistically.

The streamlined cats, birds and other creatures seen in the artist’s paintings echo the forms of her earlier sculptures. A selection of about 20 of these, mostly from the 1970s, complement the show’s pictures. Usually made of cast aluminum, the small figurines are sleek, but with rough surfaces that resemble concrete. They appear ideal for placement in the sort of garden Bodnarchuk tended daily.

Raya Bodnarchuk: Do Something You Love Every Day Through July 27 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.