A Day at the Beach, by Mike Hicks and Matt Dunn. Ocean City, Md., July 8.

TOMORROW: Crafty Bastards Arts & Crafts Fair in Adams Morgan! We might sound a little biased, but this is the best event in D.C. all year.

Check out the fair map, preview the art to make your shopping list, and get all your FAQ answered.

What else is there besides crafts to buy? Food to judge, make something awesome, live demos (screen printing, bike maintenance, knitting), a BBoy battle, and a prize pack worth $800 for you to win. Are you a Crafty veteran? Here’s what you’ll see that’s new this year.

Hungry? This year’s fair will have quite a few vendors including Amsterdam Falafel, Black Squirrel, Carmen’s Italian Ice, Dangerously Delicious Pies, Hill Country Barbecue, Shawarma Spot, Smoothie King, and more.

The fair runs from 10am-5pm (rain or shine) outdoors on the grounds of the Marie Reed Learning Center at 18th & Wyoming in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.

See you there! And come say hi to the City Paper staff at our booth!

WHAT TO DO TODAY:

The farewell show for Irvine Contemporary’s 14th Street NW location features works by 10 artists, but most of them pale in comparison to the insanely clever sculptures of Sebastian Martorana. Sure, Kerry Skarbakka intrigues with a self-portrait of himself tumbling through the air while in the thrall of a Bierstadt landscape at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; Akemi Maegawa impresses with a Chia Pet–like sculpture of a brain with tender shoot growing from its top; and Susana Raab reprises her photograph of a Southern-vernacular flag sculpture made from plastic cups stuck into a fence. But really, it’s difficult for any of the artists to compete with the understated yet dazzling works of Martorana, a Baltimore sculptor who confidently pulls off a reverse Claes Oldenburg: making soft objects hard. In “Canvas,” Martorana carves a piece of marble so it bears the subtle textures of a painter’s canvas, right down to gently folded corners. In “Frustration 8 1/2 x 11,” he turns another hunk of marble into a ream of office paper, including a top sheet that’s slightly crinkled. But his tour de force is a humble bath towel carved from marble, tossed over a rod—a work that exudes an incongruous delicacy. —Louis Jacobson

The exhibition is on view 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays to August 27 at Irvine Contemporary, 1412 14th St. NW. Free.

WHAT TO DO TONIGHT:

The twin exhibitions now on view at Flashpoint don’t limit themselves to appearing in the gallery; they become part of it, toying with the architectural features not just of the exhibition space, but also the facility’s accompanying cubicles, conference rooms, and bathroom areas. In Trace, Nicole Herbert adds a series of supernumerary fixtures to the office in ways that echo the surroundings, such as windows with taped outlines that abstract the view outside, or fake water pipes that go from nowhere to nowhere. The works are hard to locate, even with motion-sensored lights to illuminate them, and their conceptual impact is equally subtle. More successful are the works of Janell Olah (pictured), curated by Amanda Jirón-Murphy. Olah hijacks the building’s air vents and HVAC system with a network of translucent plastic coverings that inflate and deflate depending on how the air is flowing. The appearance of Olah’s works is frustratingly indifferent—the visual vibe of her materials might be described as “IKEA-shower-curtain”—but the notion of giving a star turn to something as fleeting as airflow is clever. Plus, there’s something unexpectedly thrilling about a row of cloud-shaped plastic forms spontaneously inflating in unison whenever the AC kicks on. —Louis Jacobson

The exhibitions are on view noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays and noon to 3 p.m. Saturdays to August 27 at Flashpoint, 916 G St NW. Free. 

WHAT TO DO TODAY:

The Phillips Collection’s “Left Behind: Selected Gifts from the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection” has a promising theme—photographs of “unpopulated spaces in which a human presence is not evident but only implied.” But the selection of eight artists is uneven. The exhibition includes uninspired works by otherwise talented artists—Vesna Pavlovic (a pair of drab examples from a generally impressive project documenting hotels built by Yugoslavia’s former Communist leadership) and Thomas Demand (images of a painstakingly constructed miniature grotto that’s unexpectedly bland when photographed). Darren Almond photographed his studio at regular intervals, then mounted the resulting 1,320 images, each with a slightly different hue of light, in an enormous matrix—a gambit that is more interesting from a distance than up close. Jane and Louise Wilson offer a photograph less notable for its visuals than for the unlikelihood of its ever being made—an image of a darkly lavish corner of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas at a time when it’s deserted. But the most impressive work comes from three artists. Frank Thiel’s image of buildings being constructed in Berlin in 1996 adapts the cool, pale palette and industrial fascination of Edward Burtynsky. Massimo Vitali’s photograph of a miniature car ride at a Volkswagen plant in Germany offers a bracingly disorienting contrast in scale. And Catherine Yass uses a suspended, moving camera to photograph an urban scene; the unpredictable movement creates an abstraction of lovely blue that improbably suggests a waterfall. —Louis Jacobson

The exhibition is on view 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays to Oct. 2 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. 

WHAT TO DO TONIGHT:

Most of the works in “Tribute 1,” the first of two artist tributes showing at Irvine Contemporary before the gallery moves in August, are shaped by intense, intricate detail. Shawne Major builds amorphous wall sculptures from a frenzy of multicolored plastic gewgaws, while Brooklyn artist [dNASAb] creates birdlike hanging sculptures using LEDs and fiber-optics. Teo González’s dizzying dots, painstakingly layered on panels with acrylics and gold, always manage—somehow—to not touch each other. With acrylic on canvas, Robert Mellor creates fastidiously prepared, rubbery-surfaced images of vegetation, and James Marshall (Dalek) offers detailed, fancifully colored geometrical abstractions. But the showstoppers are Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s collaborations: Both in black and white and color, their photomontages are built on absurdist faux-historical narratives set in locations ranging from outer space to an iceberg, almost like Jerry Uelsmann on steroids. In a show mostly defined by intricacy, Kahn and Selesnick’s giddy audaciousness is a welcome standout. —Louis Jacobson

The exhibition is on view 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays to July 16 at Irvine Contemporary, 1412 14th St. NW.

WHAT TO DO TONIGHT:

When you have no particular destination in mind, you never know where you’ll end up. This, more or less, is the philosophy of Ann Tarantino, who uses ink and gouache on paper to create meandering designs in washed out blues and grays. In “SuperNatural,” her exhibit at Curator’s Office, Tarantino uses sprays, air compressors, and even her breath to spread around ink, leaving delicate forms that range from peacock markings to nerve endings to jellyfish tendrils to bunches of cells. Most of the artist’s works are flat, though one consists of a wall-mounted, diamond-shaped, three-dimensional matrix of cylindrically rolled paper. Tarantino’s most convincing pieces are her most monochromatic. The addition of bold oranges and reds look too calculated to represent the capriciousness she values. One aspect missing from the exhibit is a better sense of her process; videos of Tarantino in action would have added depth to our understanding of her work. —Louis Jacobson

The exhibition is on view noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday to June 25 at Curator’s Office, 1515 14th St. NW, Suite 201. Free.