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Books, printed pages, lines of calligraphy, and single letters are raw materials for Massachusetts artist Sandra Bowden. Her fascination with the visual aspects of language comes out of her experience as an artist growing up in a conservative Protestant faith community where words took primacy over images and was deepened by her study of biblical Hebrew and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This collagraph print, created from a plate with textured materials on the surface, includes passages from two foundational Hebrew and Christian “in the beginning” narratives about the origins of the universe.

For 40 days an empty lot in a Detroit neighborhood was the site of an installation titled Wind, by husband-and-wife artists Billy and Sarah Mark. It is made up of three flagpoles, a “flag” (a hoodie with 20-foot sleeves), a rope, a pulpit, two benches, copies of the psalms, and a journal. At designated times of sunrise and sunset, someone would read one of the psalms. People in the neighborhood were invited to engage the work by putting on the hoodie and raising the sleeves with the rope. When the space is not inhabited, the “flag” is filled by the wind.

There is a gentle poetry in R. Sawan White’s work. Her paintings are subtle palimpsests of wax and oil on board, assiduously built up in translucent layers, like foggy breaths on a window smudged with fingerprints. Indeed, the works encourage the viewer to draw exceptionally close to examine them, holding out the promise that their abstract streaks, scratches, and scribbles might belong to some secret script. In the end, their refusal disclose a single, decipherable message—whether pictorially or literally—is their greatest strength.