Nothing sits still in Teresa Oaxaca’s The Feast of the Gods. The sprawling oil on linen (pictured at right) depicts a girl in a bed of yellow and coral-pink roses, strewn with babies in glossy satins, some wailing, others fast asleep, doll-like. Doves, one French blue, another deep amber, perch here and there. The girl, her eyes a brilliant azure, her straw-yellow hair twisted like a vine, looks out at something beyond the frame, the world spilling out in every direction.

The painting is one of more than 60 works by local women artists featured at the American University Museum as part of the multisite survey exhibition Women Artists of the DMV, which closed in December. Arrayed across 16 locations in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, the combined catalog included pieces by 400 artists, each a kind of firebrand.

The works—coiled porcelains and garnet-red acrylics, marbled papers and intricately carved mahogany—were wondrous, intricate—like a story one returns to, always arriving at something new. “I like unusual work,” says curator Lenny Campello. Artists who “want to say something out of the ordinary.”

Particularly extraordinary is Jenny Kanzler’s Goat Girls, Sunday Afternoon. Suffused with mint greens and velvety citrons, it shows two narrow beds, one unmade, its gossamer-thin sheets drawn back in a perfect diagonal. A girl in a white polka-dot dress hovers in the air, her face out of view. Another, with a goat’s head, sits nearby, her face turned away, her copper eyes searing. Two legs jut out from under the bed, where a phone cord leads. It’s a scene of suspended belief, of boundless play.

The show—the first survey of female visual artists working across the Washington area— coincided with AU’s Feminist Art History Conference, which brought together scholars to examine “the real breadth of what constitutes ‘feminist art,’” says Nika Elder, an art professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. “People might assume that the work makes overt political statements, and sometimes it does. But just as often, it is about activating materials, histories, and relationships that have been overlooked—or worse, marginalized—in institutional settings.”

Shows like this one bring those histories to the fore, holding up the arts, Elder maintains, as “a tool to foster cultural literacy and respect, to imagine alternate realities, and to champion those whose voices might be underrepresented or repressed in other contexts.”

Pearl Shen’s Early Autumn has that verve. The expansive work of ink on rice paper pictures a woman on a faded yellow bicycle. She’s stopped, balanced on one leg. In a pale gray sweater and printed skirt, she has an easy grace, her earphones twisted ever so slightly, a book bag slung over her shoulders. It’s a quiet work, self-assured. “Washington is a city where people are constantly moving in and out,” Campello says. The woman in Shen’s picture, like many in the city, exists in and out of time, poised, delicately, tenuously, between this moment and the next.