Manifest Hope exhibition entrance, Georgetown

Pulling into Washington, DC last night by my usual route - Bladensburg Road onto H Street NE - I saw little sign of anything other than a standard (if extra-cold) winter Friday evening in the imperial capital; at least not along the gas-station and fast-food arteries of Northeast, with their intimations of tumbleweed ghetto life in the streets behind. The tale-of-two-cities narrative is familiar and much-repeated in the District, with fairly acute poverty and dereliction stretching into the metaphoric shadow of the Capitol. There's high hope here that a president and first family who are non only African-American, but also longtime city folk, will invest themselves and encourage others to invest, economically and culturally, in these neighborhoods. For the moment, change is coming mostly through gentrification - the H Street corridor, a commercial thoroughfare of black DC before the 1968 riots, is starting to fill in with hipster taverns and yuppie markets - with all the complex issues that that raises.

Detail of a panel by Chicago's Ray Noland

Anyway, there wasn't too much time to contemplate these matters as I had to quickly unload my stuff and hustle across the city to Georgetown, where the group show of about 150 artists called Manifest Hope was holding its opening reception in a large, airy two-level gallery space on M Street. Manifest Hope, which had its first run in Denver during the Democratic National Convention, is the brainchild of a group including promoter/publicist Yosi Sergeant and artist Shepard Fairey, he of the now ubiquitous 'Hope' prints with the shaded Obama portrait that became THE icon of the campaign, not to mention spawned numerous bootlegs and ironic adaptations. (By the way, forgive the crappy cellphone pics. I had a little camera disaster. Better pics later!)

Shepard Fairey addresses the people

The DC edition of the show runs only this weekend - closing party Monday night featuring Brooklyn's own electro-funk-pop sensation of the moment, Santogold - and like any group show, it's a mixed bag, with some great pieces and others that quickly descend into shlock and garishness. In an interview for this story a couple of weeks ago, Fairey told me that they wanted artists this time around to move on from Obama to substantive themes such as health care, worker's rights, and the green economy. But I'd say about three-quarters of the work on display still centered on Obama, with various forms of portraiture - photographs; oil, acrylic and watercolors; collages; sculptures in various materials - dominating. Of the topical work, I especially liked Fairey's ominous 'Evolve/Devolve,' an effective and visually satisfying large-scale collage devoted to moving from oil to renewable energy, with a backdrop of newsprint from the 1930s, and a series of propaganda panels by Scot LeFavor of Boulder, Colo., calling on us to 'Manifest Acceptance' (with an image of a same sex couple), 'Manifest Healthcare' and so forth.

A rather loud Michelle portrait overlooks the bar

Very little Michelle Obama portraiture compared to the images of her husband, and what I've seen has not done it for me in the least - witness this huge and rather garish number by Lisa Marie Thalhammer, hovering right over one of the Belvedere Vodka-sponsored open bars. Hmmm... As for the Barack treatments, many of them are still mining themes like Obama-as-basketball player that to my mind hover pretty close to stereotyping. (Perhaps this is a good time to mention that in my reporting, I've found that the Obama artists tend to be white, and certainly the crowd at this opening party was dominantly young, hip and Caucasian.)

There's a lot going on in the brother's brain

But there was sweet stuff here too: I couldn't help but smile at Larissa Marantz's 'Unite America,' in which we see events like Dr. King's 'I Have A Dream' address and the integration of the Little Rock schools unfolding inside Barack's brain. Corny? Sure. Didactic? Certainly. But charming at the same time, and in touch with the big sweep of history that is coming manifest this week - no matter what happens next.