One component of the ongoing Rasa Festival can be seen through September 30 at the Riverside Arts Gallery in Ypsilanti. Riverside Arts Gallery’s lower-level space houses many large, vibrant, and gestural paintings, and geometric, mandala designs in ritualistic floor art known as rangoli, alpana, or kolam.

The show, Madhavi: Illusion’s Beer, which is a part of 2017’s Rasa Festival exhibitions, collectively focuses on the Navarasa (Nine Rasas). This can also be translated as “the nine moods,” which are various facets of Indian aesthetics. These facets include love/beauty, laughter, sorrow, anger, heroism/courage, terror/fear, disgust, surprise/wonder, and peace/tranquility.

The 2017 University of Michigan Alumni Exhibition Ambiguities/Innuendoes? Go Fish features an eclectic collection of alumni works that engage, in varying capacities, with the terms “ambiguity” and “innuendo.” The annual exhibition allows STAMPS alumni to show their work. This year, work represented over 70 years of alumni from 1955 to 2016. This year, the exhibition featured juror Brian Kennedy, the president, director, and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art.

The 2017 Ann Arbor Women Artists Summer Juried Exhibit illustrates the diverse talent in the Ann Arbor area. Though the name implies this nonprofit organization features women artists only, by 2008 the group included 10 men. The volunteer-run organization is now open to all artists 18 and older. Today, this local art group has over 300 members. In this year’s annual AAWA Juried exhibition, 46 artists have their work on display. The works represented are executed in a variety of media, both 2D and 3D.

University of Michigan Museum of Art’s recently opened Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors -- Part II: Abstraction is the second show in a two-part series that began in February with Part I: Figuration. The exhibition includes a wide range of art, from an Amish quilt by an unknown maker to modern and contemporary works by influential artists such as Pablo Picasso, Christo, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Jasper Johns, John Baldessari, and many more.

As the title suggests, the show consists of a diverse range of works collected by University of Michigan alumni. The contributors come from 70 years of graduating classes, displaying the long-standing, continuing impact of university alumni collectors on the global art world. UMMA states that the show “offers an unprecedented opportunity to view art that may have never been publicly displayed otherwise -- and most certainly, not all together.”

REMIX, an exhibition at the Ann Arbor Art Center’s 117 Gallery, contains two exhibitions: one in the physical space of the gallery and one virtual. Described as an “augmented reality experience,” ReMIXED Reality was created by Andrew Rosinski and ICON Interactive.

In addition to the works of art hanging on the walls, visitors can download the custom virtual reality app, which can be found in your phone’s app store. The app creates a virtual gallery that is “superimposed” over the physical artworks on the gallery walls and can be viewed on your phone. Throughout the gallery are small symbols on the wall that can be scanned by the ReMIXED application to bring up an array of virtual works of art.

The virtual gallery includes imagery ranging from digitally made virtual paintings to photographs and kaleidoscopic views. Some of the pieces move with you as you move through the gallery space. Other symbols create a perspectival virtual space that extends behind the square, black symbol, or projects in front of it.

In March of this year, University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art and Design opened the Stamps Gallery on the first floor of the McKinley Towne Centre, 201 S. Division. The new space offers an accessible art-viewing experience in downtown Ann Arbor and features large glass windows, which particularly impacted my viewing of the sculptural works on display by Anne Mondro as part of Reach: A Stamps Faculty Exhibition.

Her hanging sculptures, intricately constructed from tiny copper, silver, and bronze wires, represent various human hearts and anterior organs. Three hearts hang austerely in a row in the front of the gallery, which immediately drew my interest. I visited in the evening, on a sunny day, a perfect time to catch these sculptures illuminated by the setting sun.

Nora Venturelli has maintained a significant interest in figure drawing and painting throughout her career, and specialized in studying the human form in college. Her work addresses themes of movement, shadow, and the body in its relation to interior thought processes. These concerns are evident in her most recent work on display at WSG Gallery in an exhibit titled Vice Versa, which runs through June 10. In addition to her series on the human figure, Venturelli has worked with a number of other subjects, including landscapes and still life.

Venturelli was born in Rosario, Argentina, and emigrated to California in 1968 after graduating high school. Today, she teaches both drawing and painting at Eastern Michigan University and University of Michigan STAMPS School of Art & Design, and lives in both the United States and Argentina. She is active in the arts community, showing her work locally and internationally.