Seattle artist Curtis Erlinger tries—sort of—to get at his parents' past. He takes their old photographs and paints them in ink on paper. Each 20-inch-square painting is overlaid with a piece of sheer cloth like a blurring lens.

They're fiendishly hard to photograph, but Erlinger shot some with his phone (another lens that stretches the ability to witness), and sent them via email. Obviously, they need to be seen in person—at PUNCH through Saturday, October 30—but here's a taste:

Massachusetts artist Annie Bissett's show of prints at Cullom Gallery, We Are Pilgrims, looks at a collective past that could use some blurring and broadening: the story of pilgrim-times. In Bissett's woodblocks, there are gay pilgrims, young native men going off to Harvard, mixed-race lovers, and mixed-emotion portraits. A pair of oval bust portraits titled John Alden, 1621 & Priscilla Mullins, 1621 bear the inscriptions, "Priscilla's family died that winter," and "John Alden was a hunk but there were lice in his hair."