Visiting a portrait show can be like standing in a room full of people you don’t know. But with prolonged contact, artworks, like people, reveal themselves. A fascination with portraits led Virginia Outwin Boochever (1920 – 2005), a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, to endow a portrait competition at the museum where she led tours for almost 20 years.

As a painter, Stuart Davis (1892-1964) represented a trailblazing strain of 20th-century American optimism. His jaunty canvases extended European modernism over a wide range of territory and human subject material. He celebrated urban streetscapes, shorelines and mundane life with an eye-popping sense of jazz-influenced rhythm and invention.

Want to see the largest painting Jackson Pollock ever made? Now’s your chance. Through Oct. 29, Pollock’s “Mural,” measuring 8 by 20 feet, is on view in the Bloch Building Project Space. The showing in Kansas City is part of a global victory lap for the painting — now back in U.S. from a tour of Europe — following two years of restoration work. Made in 1943, “Mural” is the ultimate transitional work in Pollock’s oeuvre.

They’re magic, embedded with reflections on history and our relationship to the land. During a year-long residency in Oklahoma, Rena Detrixhe conceived her “Red Dirt..