The first irony is that the wording of artist Masaharu Futoyu’s piece is taken from a sign in Futaba, a town that’s been off limits since the partial meltdown last spring at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The second is that the artwork, which gently questions the Japanese power company TEPCO, is on display at the PEPCO Edison Place Gallery.

But in the current show at the University of Maryland University College Arts Program Gallery, the process is reversed.

The 18 artists from 13 countries represented in “The Poetics of Water” devised their work from poems. Two Washington poets were involved in the program, Kim Roberts and Dan Vera. They in turn coaxed poems out of separate workshops involving senior citizens and at-risk African American boys.

“Warhol: Headlines,” which opens at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, is the museum’s first major exhibition devoted to the artist. It leaves no doubt about the curator’s point of view: Warhol was no irony-soaked provocateur mindlessly importing pop pizzazz into the sanctums of high art for pure shock value. He was strategic, intelligent and brilliantly adept at analyzing and indicting the world we live in today, a world he seemed to both predict and forge through games of representation we now know by the encompassing shorthand: Warholian.

But 13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady of West Hartford knew he was right. The seventh-grader had just studied the empire in school before going to the museum last summer.

The choice indicates the Smithsonian’s commitment to tell more American stories as part of its strategic plan. The Smithsonian has often been criticized for not including in-depth histories of events and people from the West, outside of the National Museum of the American Indian.

The gift, which was announced by the Smithsonian Institution on Thursday, will go to a new dinosaur hall, which has been high on the list of needed renovations at the museum.

Where is it? Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and G streets NW. 202-633-1000. www.americanart.si.edu.

When is it? Through September 30. 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.

For Valerie Neal, curator of human spaceflight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the answer was simple: Present the space shuttle as if it had just landed, gear down, payload doors closed, underbelly scorched.