There’s something, tender, comical and on point about Tony Gray’s mixed-media paintings and collages, now up at the Boston University Sherman Gallery. The works, from the “Panther Series,” are mostly populated with black men. Some look like Black Panthers, in bell bottoms, turtle necks, and shades. But others come in all skin tones and body types, drawn in a flat, economical, faux naive style. They often interact with newspaper clips which invoke the popular culture of Gray’s youth in the 1960s and 1970s. There are surprising hints of homoeroticism. Much of the series is a deconstruction of the stereotypes of African-American masculinity of that era. The sweetness comes with the main characters in these drawings, striving to find and be themselves amid all the representations of black men and other media messages, mining the rift between who they are, and who they’re supposed to be.

Over at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Alex Lukas has a show of extravagantly detailed and crafted cityscapes – overgrown and deserted, post-civilization. The theme is not new – I recently saw strikingly similar images on a trailer for one of the coming fall television shows – but the rendering is exquisite. Lukas uses silkscreen, ink, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. He creates so many textures, one can only describe the devastation he portrays as lush. Also in this week’s galleries column, at NK Gallery Ken Hruby’s cast sculptures of ancient helmets in many mediums including glass, metal, and handmade paper, address traumatic brain injury. Their surfaces ripple like the surface a brain. They convey both the nobility and the vulnerability of the warrior. And Deborah Davidson’s miminalist sculptures are coated with pulsing pastels, with jittery marks that seem to arise from within, like something yet to be revealed but erupting.

Having your own space, no matter how small, is part of the American dream. Performance artist Heidi Kayser is taking her dream to Fort Point Channel, where she has anchored an eight-by-eight-foot raft. She rows out there, when the weather permits, and renovates — she’ll be doing it throughout May, for “The Remodeling Project.” When I saw her in action early last week, she switched out her “For Rent” sign for a small desk, a sturdy chair, and a dozen phones. She rowed out to the raft, which is secured near the Summer Street Bridge along the Harbor Walk, in a chic black business suit, climbed on board, and built her desk before she set to answering phones. In the future, she may do some ironing there, or lay down some sod. “It’s about what we do with our space,” Kayser says. “If you’re lucky, you have a yard. A cubicle. My studio in the South End is about that size.”

The project is garnering attention. One passerby snapped a photo before Kayser arrived in her kayak. “I’m thinking about posting on Facebook, saying ‘I need my own island,’ ” said the woman, who declined to give her name. Gabrielle Schaffner, who heads up the Fort Point Arts Community, which is presenting “The Remodeling Project” as part of its Floating Art Series, says that the neighborhood intrigued.

Early in May, Kayser put up a “For Rent” sign with @theRMProject, where she can be reached on Twitter. When she closes up shop, she plans to put a “For Sale” sign on the raft. For the right price, this little patch of paradise could be yours.

Near the end of its run, Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist, at the Portland Museum of Art, presents an intimate look at Degas as he teaches himself to draw and relentlessly experiments with printmaking. The heart of the show, drawn from a private collection, features works on paper by the artist, from a very early drawing of his brother Achille on through his career.  They testify to his fidelity to the figuration pioneered by Renaissance artists, despite his much more modern approach to beauty, which he could find in the mundane and the awkward. That dark edge  verging on clumsiness, and an astute sense of how the human body lends itself to abstraction, was what made the recent “Degas and the Nude” at the Museum of Fine Arts so engrossing. It’s evident here, too. There’s a terrific pastel (borrowed from another private collector), “Danseuse assise (Seated Dancer),” which is all splayed limbs around a fluff of tangerine tutu in the center.

The show also fleshes out the artist’s social circle – a little too much. It’s fascinating to see Degas’s prints, made from canceled plates (with scratch marks, as you can see in the self-portrait above) of friends such as Manet and Cassatt. The collector whose works make up most of the show, curator Robert Flynn Johnson, also includes snapshots Degas took of friends horsing around. But the exhibit becomes unwieldy as it includes works by too many artists, some only middling, who had some connection to the artist. The initial experience of viewing small, frail drawings and prints is a thrillingly cozy encounter with one great master, like a lovely candlelit dinner for two. Too bad it ends with an experience akin to a crowded cocktail reception packed with jostling, if erudite, egos. I’d rather be lingering over dessert with Degas.

Painter Paul Shakespear, who has a show up at Howard Yezerski Gallery, applies dozens of layers of glaze to his paintings. There are no images. The paintings are more objects than pictures. You find yourself gazing into them the way you might peer into an aquarium, because light seems to be bouncing around inside the murky tones – as in “Vault,” pictured above. Not all his works are luminous; some panels address texture with as much nuance as these address light and hue. Sometimes he matches opaque panels with translucent ones in a single piece, setting up a conversation. For me, though, each panel in itself commands contemplation. Also at Yezerski, Karl Baden’s color photos shot through car windows make a comic counterpoint to Shakespear’s paintings. Both have the feeling of looking through. Baden sets up the world outside the car as wild, over the top, movie-like, positioning the car’s interior as a safe zone.

Also in this week’s galleries column: Nancy Selvage’s large, suspended and illuminated sculptures of perforated aluminum at Boston Sculptors Gallery appear to shimmer and leap. Sarah Hutt’s show there deploys the artist’s dreams as source material. She makes a delightful wall of awkward clay sculptures, like fetish figures. There are drawings and text coated in beeswax, too. But the parts don’t add up to a whole; they never loft into metaphor. Finally, three worthy shows at Galatea Fine Art, starting with Cynthia Maurice’s muscular drawings of cut flowers, which are big and shaky and ominous. Then there are Arnold Trachtman’s jazzy, graphic paintings from his life growing up in Lynn, and Ruth LaGue’s encaustic landscapes, which hang frosting-like texture and sometimes too dazzling color on the simple, direct scaffolding of a horizon line. When the colors don’t push too hard, these are wonderfully tactile, airy paintings.

Megan and Murray McMillan make ambitious video installations. They want to merge the viewer’s experience of tangible reality in the gallery with the visions projected on screen. Every piece of theirs that I have seen uses collaborative performance, elaborate sets, and a transformed gallery space to conjure a dream world – and send viewers into that same lush realm of “let’s pretend” that children are so familiar with. It’s their own version of Neverland, constructed in empty warehouses in Pawtucket.

Their new installation, “When We Didn’t Touch the Ground,” up at the Granoff Center for Creative Arts at Brown University, succeeds on many levels and falters once or twice. The scene in the video (pictured above) is the cusp of evening, as adults set the dinner table, and children are called in from outside. A boy wanders along a brook, and over a wall — except he’s a man, not a boy, and the brook is made up of reflective shards, and the wall is stacked furniture. The brook and the wall extend into the gallery space. Part of the McMillans’ aesthetic is their lack of artifice. They don’t try to pass off a warehouse as a back yard. It’s all, obviously, made up, the way a child makes a fort out of sofa cushions. And at first, it all comes across as contrived.

Then, in the video, a big wooden box floats overhead, and a girl lowers herself down to the dinner table with acrobatic elegance, along a rope made of sheets. This is the transporting moment, when all that seemed contrived suddenly coalesces into a larger, magical vision, and we’re looking at Wendy, arrived home from Neverland. Unfortunately, the box didn’t make it into the gallery space. That would have cinched the experience. Instead, this viewer was left outside, when everyone else went in for a meal.

Also in this week’s galleries, Stephen Tourlentes’ black-and-white photographs of prison complexes at Carroll and Sons convey the complexity of our society’s relationship with incarceration, quite literally in shades of gray. The tonalities of the prints are lush, with lights and haze and nighttime all coming across in velvety grays. Then, at Gallery Kayafas, Tim Donovan’s stirring portraits (such as the untitled one at right) are ultimately a scrim upon which the viewer projects what he or she needs. Donovan uses Photoshop to bleach out all his subjects’ features but their eyes and lips. Limpid eyes float out of a white haze, and gaze penetratingly at the viewer. And there’s a great match between Donovan’s work and that of Zoe Perry-Wood, who is showing her “BAGLY Prom” photos of an annual dance held by Boston-area gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. Where identity in Donovan’s photos fades away, the young people in Perry-Wood’s photos assert their identities with costume and makeup. And yet for all the certainty of their presentation, they still come across as adolescents, bravely declaring who they are, but not really sure.

Every spring, the art schools (Mass Art, the Museum School, BU) stage thesis shows for the MFA graduate students. It’s the place to troll for new and exciting artists who may have significant careers ahead. This year, I sat down with six especially promising young artists to talk about their work. Check out the painting above, a portrait by Arhia Kohlmoos, of the Museum School, of her sister, Rhiannon. Like many paintings, you’ve got to see this one in person to understand how exquisitely it is made – with many thin layers, often painted with a tiny brush. Kohlmoos packs her vivid portraits with symbols that represent her subjects – herself and her sisters – and the cloistered culture they shared, growing up home-schooled.

Then there’s Mass Art sculptor Jessie Vogel, whose “2012 Cement” is at right. Vogel’s work featured hard-edged structures with sand-packed nylon oozing out. The soft parts read like pendulous body parts, or excretions. Also at Mass Art, abstract photographer Carlos Jiménez Cahua exposes photographic paper that he folds and tears, and lets the light draw the picture – or really, the wildly vivid colors. His thesis show, coming up in May, will feature photographic installation work that plays on the colors and architecture of the gallery space. A third Mass Art student, painter Leila Namin, comes from Iran, where she had to censor herself as an artist. At Mass Art, she’s been liberated to express her outrage in paintings that depict people who are gagged, or who have no mouths. Other paintings read more like fairy tales – about puppets and their masters, or about rituals. They are delicately rendered, harrowing works.

Heidi Hogden, another Museum School artist, makes large-scale drawings of the land her family owns in Franklin, Wisconsin. The scale shows off Hogden’s technical wizardry. In a drawing of her brother, Eric, out hunting in camouflage with a crossbow, she renders the pattern of his jacket dizzyingly against the patterns of grass and foliage behind him, and light over the distant trees switches from carving out negative space to defining forms.

Finally, there’s a Greek artist, Natalia Afentoulidou, at BU. A detail of her installation of paintings and monoprints is below. In her work, Afentoulidou grapples with her move to the U.S. just as Greece’s economy was tanking. Recycled boxes capture American consumerism. The cut-out Trojan Horse you see in front of an undulating wall of polka dots represents the past, and what we carry with us from the past.

Bob Raymond photographed performance artists at and sponsored by the artist-run group Mobius for close to 30 years. He died in February after a brief illness, and there’s a remarkable retrospective of his Mobius photos now on view at Studio Soto. Raymond’s images capture performance art as ritual: mysterious actions that penetrate the veil of the ordinary to reveal, however briefly, some truth about what it is to be human. At right, Ramond’s photo of William Pope L. in his 2003 performance “angel-vision” depicts the artist surrounded by darkness, showering himself with white powder. Pope L. makes a lot of ritualistic work, some of it about race, but I don’t know what this particular performance addressed – all we have, in the context of Raymond’s show, is this provocative image. Perhaps he’s smothered by the powder; perhaps it anoints him. There are many such pictures in Raymond’s exhibit: People painted red or blue. A trombone flying over a man’s head. A red chair suspended high in a leafless tree. They all prompt metaphors and questions, and cumulatively lead us into a dream world. Like living inside a poem.

Also in this week’s galleries column, Jim Dow’s “American Studies” show at Robert Klein Gallery features lush color photos, many taken 30 or more years ago, of scenes that are archetypically American: ballparks, diners, gas stations, burger joints – such as “Orleans Burger Joint at Night, New Orleans, LA, 1980,” at left. They are familiar, yet specific. Some – the Town Diner in Watertown (now the Deluxe Town Diner), and Fenway Park – are still around, but they’ve been spiffed up since Dow photographed them. There’s a strange sensation that time is both moving and standing still. Finally, ACME Fine Art’s retrospective of American Modernist Kenneth Stubbs (1907-1967) delineates his progression from a realist to a Cubist with keen attention to proportion and tone. His later works, such as the terrific 1962 canvas “Sunbathers,” below, flatten scenes into bright patterns of light and shadow. This one churns with sickle slices, turning a beach scene into a bright pinwheel.

Gorgeous, isn’t it? This is Carrie Moyer’s painting “Barbute,” one of many delectable canvases in Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, up at the Worcester Art Museum. I’m going to state the obvious. See the show in person. Don’t expect images on the Internet, or even the very handsome catalog, to possibly do Moyer’s paintings justice. She achieves wild effects with her pours of acrylic paint (echoes of Helen Frankenthaler), which caress hard-edged forms abstracted from ancient art – vessels, helmets, figurines. The paint glows and sparkles, it crinkles and breathes. It’s gritty and cracked.

The work fits into a lineage of erotically charged feminist art (as curator Susan L. Stoops points out in her catalog essay) that includes work by Lynda Benglis and Elizabeth Murray. Moyer throws in the very intentional tools of graphic design, such as those hard-edged forms, and she braces that against the unpredictable dance of pouring paint. The works, with their veils of translucent color, their touchable materiality, and their pendulous forms, are made to seduce. They bring to mind that 1980s Pantene commercial: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” You won’t.