1. Kitsunebi by Kenji Nakayama

Kenji Nakayama moved to Boston from Japan a decade ago to study traditional sign painting, a skill he’s plied in his day job at Best Dressed Signs and in his Signs for the Homeless project, featuring interviews and photos of homeless locals who exchange cardboard signs for colorful hand-painted versions. Recently, he’s used his pinstriping prowess in abstract compositions, evoking stained glass and Edo-era calligraphy. On view April 18-May 18 at Fourth Wall Project, his first solo Boston show, Études, collects 49 of these works on paper, plus 3-D pieces like a huge crucifix rescued from the trash and transformed.

2. Water Pollution by ICY and SOT

Forthcoming gallery/restaurant Liquid Art House serves up street art for its inaugural exhibit, Outside In. On view May 6-June 18, it taps talents from around the world, among them brothers ICY and SOT, 20-something stencil artists who moved to Brooklyn in 2012 after being arrested and interrogated in their native Iran. They started out stenciling their skateboards, but have since brought their punchy, politically charged art to gallery walls and urban canvases in Tehran, Paris, New York, Amsterdam and beyond.

3. Do you _ _ _ _ _ me? by Shannon McDonald

A thousand words are worth a picture at Panopticon Gallery, which hosts W-O-R-D-P-L-A-Y through June 9, showcasing photography and mixed-media works that draw upon letters and literature. It features 13 artists, including Frank Armstrong, who has more than 50 years of photos under his belt, and Shannon McDonald, who creates her collages in a shoe factory turned studio in Rockland.

4. Rachele VII, Palmdale, California by Formento & Formento

Hopper meets Hitchcock in the photos of husband-and-wife team BJ and Richeille Formento. She was a high-fashion art director; he a commercial photographer who assisted Avedon and Leibovitz. They met on a shoot, married three months later and now collaborate on highly stylized tableaux—like the dark, dreamy series Circumstance, featuring women they met on a cross-country road trip, who turn into femme fatales in faded diners and abandoned motels. Robert Klein Gallery will host a Formento & Formento show this spring, likely in May.

5. Reja Naranja (Orange Bars) by Daniel Medina

Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection hits the Museum of Fine Arts March 19-July 13 with works by 46 artists, many never featured in Boston. Curator Jen Mergel notes “the extraordinary variety and diversity of the work,” ranging from humble—Wilfredo Prieto’s Untitled (Globe of the World), inked onto a dried pea—to high-tech, like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Third Person, which incorporates digital surveillance. Many pack political punch, like Daniel Medina’s sculpture above, suggestive of a security gate, and the indelible video ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?), in which Regina José Galindo walks to Guatemala City’s National Palace, dipping her feet in human blood every few steps in defiant protest of a dictator’s presidential candidacy. (Hear more from Mergel on the exhibit here.)

6. Before the Revolution by Eleanor Antin

Born in the Bronx in 1935, Eleanor Antin has since lived many lives—as a Crimean War nurse, a typecast ballerina in the Ballets Russes, a bearded king who rules a bemused beach town. Through films, photographs, performances, writings and even paper dolls, she’s explored history and identity with a slippery sense of humor and a cast of richly imagined alter egos. Meet them at the Institute of Contemporary Art March 19-July 6 in Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves,” opening with a reading by the artist from her new memoir (which takes some liberties, incorporating chitchat with Stalin).

7. Armadillo blouse and Eneyda dress  by Carla Fernández

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum hosts its first fashion exhibit with The Barefoot Designer: A Passion for Radical Design and Community, on view April 17-Sept. 1. Preserving the past while pursuing an aesthetic that’s highly contemporary, even futuristic, Mexican designer Carla Fernández collaborates with indigenous artisans, tapping traditional handicraft techniques and patterns from preindustrial textiles. This month, she’ll be in town working on a fashion shoot for the exhibit, which also features her garments and textiles, drawings, performance, video, hands-on workshops and an April 19 lecture with Fernández.

8. LIFE FORCE 2014-2 by Jordan Eagles

Squeamish types may want to steer clear of the Mills Gallery April 25-June 29, when the BCA space will host Jordan Eagles: Blood Dust, a solo show from an artist who’s worked in blood for more than a decade. It’s a surprisingly versatile medium in the hands of the New York-based Eagles, who preserves it using plexiglass and UV resin, mixes it with copper, backlights it to breathtaking effect and, yes, grinds it to dust.

Bonus Picks!  

Like #1? Then check out… more sign painting at Its Virtue Is Immense: A Pre-Vinylite Society Tribute to Script Lettering. Curated by Best Dressed Signs’ Meredith Kasabian, it features alphabetic art from 20 talents—including Nakayama—at Lot F Gallery through April 25.

Like #2? Then check out… another major street art name at Street Talk: Chris Daze Ellis in Dialogue with the Collection. On view May 3-July 31 at Andover’s Addison Gallery, the exhibit will feature works by the New York graffiti artist and painter, juxtaposed with pieces he’s hand-picked from the gallery’s holdings.

Like #3? Then check out… more art that riffs on the written word at Language as Inspiration: Works from deCordova’s Collection, on view at Lincoln’s deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum May 16-Oct. 13. 

PHOTO: ÁNGELA BONADIES/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND THE ELLA FONTANALS-CISNEROS COLLECTION; 6. FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE WITH DIAGHILEV, 1919–1929/COURTESY OF RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS; 7. PHOTO: RAMIRO CHAVES