Adel Abdessemed’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, Rio, is a sprawling one. Ambitious in scope, it takes up all of the gallery’s cavernous rooms and contains more than a dozen pieces that don’t necessarily add up to a cohesive whole.

Upon entering the P.S. 1 exhibition "Jonathan Horowitz: And/Or," one is greeted by an official portrait of President George W. Bush. The framed headshot, with the naïve, toothy grin, salt and pepper hair, and chipmunk-like cheeks of his first term, is flipped upside down as if the former president were dangling from an inverted crucifix like an ancient Roman prisoner suffering the most insulting form of death-by-state.

In 1982, when Tim Rollins harnessed the creative potential of a group of special-needs students at a South Bronx public school, where he then taught, to begin a collaboration that would span more than two decades, the Bronx still smoldered from the fires of the 1970s, and the mainstream art world was largely white, Western and male (as is Rollins himself). Challenging the myths that underprivileged kids are incapable of understanding great literary works and that their visual vocabulary ends with graffiti, Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) began gaining critical acclaim for paintings that combined pages from books they’d read—from Kafka’s Amerika to Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—with imagery inspired by that literature, including chunky Guston-like figuration and evocative abstraction.

Soon after Kodak introduced Super 8 film in 1965, a friend gave some to the young Englishman Derek Jarman, later to become a beloved filmmaker, painter and gay activist.

Pastiche and appropriation may be well-worn esthetic strategies that have circulated through the art world for at least 30 years, but the work of Alyssa Pheobus (who completed her MFA in 2008) confirms that these tactics remain vital and can transcend a reductive critique of originality. Like one musician “covering” another’s songs, Pheobus generally proceeds by extracting lyrics from popular music and poetry and “recording” them in large-scale, labor-intensive drawings, nine of which were on display in her first solo show (all works 2007 or 2008).