"Contemporary Visual Expressions" is a spirited exhibition to inaugurate the Anacostia Museum's new building -- it contains recent works by four accomplished, midcareer black artists whose takes on art and the world are self-confidently individualistic. Sam Gilliam, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Keith Morrison and William T. Williams are the four.

[ ... ]

In Morrison's paintings the narratives are spelled out in detail and profusion. Morrison recently returned to figuration after a period of abstract painting, and in his new works he explores his complex cultural heritage -- Caribbean, Afro-American -- with a rich, imagistic inventiveness. This very variety gives the painter some problems; he's in dead-certain command of his subject matter, yet he seems to be casting about for an authoritative personal style. But it's strong stuff.

Political statements are given strength by simplification: the fearsomely exaggerated sunglasses shadowing scorpion and butterfly in "Ton-Ton Macoute," the human skeleton on a dinner plate in "Bones." Memories of a Jamaican boyhood are recalled, as in a dream or in folklore, in "Echo of a Scream," with a gray skeleton dancing in the mouth of a bloated fish-within-a-fish. The emotional and spiritual complexities of Afro-American Christianity are depicted in "Spirituals," with its solitary figure ecstatically positioned upon a giant, opened holy book surrounded by diverse African and American symbols.

"Ritual of Death is a Black Tie Affair" is a big, surrealistic, seriocomic, personalized history painting, with theatrically disembodied figures -- a tuxedoed skeleton, an elastic Janus-headed steed, an earth mother and a woman with a hilariously elongated, chartreuse-stockinged, high-heeled leg -- surrounding a tense confrontation between a strong-backed personification of death and a human being stuck with a death's head grin.