The ongoing American involvement in Middle Eastern and Afghanistan conflicts is the topic of two exhibitions that feature prominently in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Gallery Crawl from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Friday. "OUT OF RUBBLE" is at SPACE gallery, 812 Liberty Ave. "Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan" will open at nearby 937 Liberty, another Trust building.

On Sunday, "OUT OF RUBBLE's" last day, the event "Disarming Words" will begin at SPACE and conclude at "Windows and Mirrors," a sort of passing of the conversational torch.

"OUT OF RUBBLE" evolved from a book of the same title edited by exhibition guest curator Susanne Slavick, Andrew W. Mellon professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. It was published last year by Charta Art Books.

The exhibition, which will travel nationally through 2014, is part of the 10 Years + Counting (10YAC) initiative, an online resource created by artists and activists to draw attention to the war in Afghanistan, the longest running conflict in America's history. The goal of the initiative is to bring the conflict back into broader public consciousness and to encourage solutions that lead to peace and constructive social actions at home (www.10yearsandcounting.org).

The 16 artists at SPACE explore their subject through a diversity of media and strategy, including irony, representation, allegory and metaphor. They are natives of Cuba, Gaza, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan and the U.K., as well as the U.S.

Jane Dixon receives material for her "Regeneration" project, comprising drawings, paintings and prints, by visiting cities that had been destroyed by war and natural disasters and rebuilt, from Berlin to Yokohama. Her work addresses the way memory after disaster is constructed, part illusory and real, factual and filtered.

Wafaa Bilal creates miniature sets based upon media photographs of destroyed interiors, ranging from mosques to Saddam Hussein's palace, for "The Ashes Series." Twenty-one grams of human ashes are sifted with other organic cinders and used in the maquettes, a reference to the belief that the body loses 21 grams of weight at death when the soul departs as cited in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film "21 Grams." The artist then photographs the tableaux and prints in large format.

Monica Haller is a collaborator of the Veterans Book Project, artists who "embed" with soldiers returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to provide a place to deposit memories, moving them from the veterans' hard drives and heads. "I visit them in memory so they don't visit me in sleep," says Nate Lewis, an Iraq veteran who joined the Army after high school and was in boot camp on Sept. 11.

Visually restoring damaged sites represents hope for their future. Lenka Clayton digitally reconstructs photographs of buildings reduced to rubble during the 2006 war with Israel in "Repairing Lebanon," while Ms. Slavick paints imagery from Persian miniatures and court arts atop Internet photographs of destruction within the former Islamic Empire.

Others conflate modern life with the war zone, as in Taysir Batniji's presentation of residential properties damaged during the Gaza war of 2008-09 in the format of real estate ads. Andrew Ellis Johnson's photographs of Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh during demolition are overlain with diagrams from a lesson book for Arabic handwriting, challenging presumption while referencing wartime bombing of hospitals.

Other artists exhibiting are Enrique Castrejon, Hirokazu Fukawa, Jennifer Karady, Osman Khan, Samina Mansuri, Simon Norfolk, Rocio Rodriguez, elin o'hara slavick and Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz.

"Windows and Mirrors," also affiliated with 10YAC, is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, a global Quaker organization working for peace and justice. The traveling exhibition comprises 45 mural panels created by artists across the U.S., and drawings by Afghan students in Kabul, which depict the daily lives of refugees, civilians and soldiers.

In addition, the Pittsburgh AFSC office brought together two local artists, a U.S. Iraq veteran and a high school-age Iraqi refugee, under the War Dialogues Project. The Sprout Fund provided support.

Joyce Wagner served as a U.S. Marine from 2002-08 and was among the first women Marines to serve in western Iraq. Post-service, she earned a bachelor's degree in cultural studies and visual art from Chatham University. She is active in the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Mina Al Doori, 16, left Iraq with her family six years ago. After living in Syria for four years, they moved to Pittsburgh in 2010. That year, she won the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' 2010 World Refugee Art Contest in her age group with a self-portrait that contrasted her life in Iraq and the U.S.

These exhibitions follow on the heels of others at Silver Eye Center for Photography and the University Art Gallery, University of Pittsburgh, each a reminder that artists are questioning the ongoing involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and each a reminder to the general populace that the country is indeed at war.

The annual free and democratic event will be held April 28-29 and is looking for planning team members. To volunteer, attend a meeting at 7 p.m. today at the Stephen Foster Community Center, 268 Main St., Lawrenceville.

Artists Tom Sarver and Tim Kaulen have organized a memorial gathering to honor photographer David L. Smith, who died Dec. 26. It will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at The Brew House, 21st and Mary streets, South Side, where Mr. Smith was a longtime member. They say the West Virginia native traced his family history back to the Revolutionary War and was a graduate of West Virginia University in Morgantown. He was the proprietor of a photography business, a bicyclist and an active member of the Association of Amateur Astronomers of Pittsburgh. Memorial gifts may be made to photography studies, WVU. Mail checks, with the notation "in memory of David L. Smith," to WVU Foundation, One Waterfront Place, 7th Floor, Box 1650, Morgantown, WV 26507.

"Creative Clash," an exploration of Pittsburgh as innovator at the intersection of art and technology, will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Carnegie Museum of Art, which is partnering with presenter Pittsburgh Technology Council. Cost is $45, $25 students; register at www.pghtech.org.

Carnegie director Lynn Zelevansky will moderate a panel of industry leaders including MK Haley, associate executive producer at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center and manager of Internal Communications, Disney Research Labs; Gregg Behr, executive director of the Grable Foundation and founder of Pittsburgh Kids & Creativity; Carl Kurlander, executive producer of Steeltown Entertainment and film/television screenwriter and producer; Tim Fletcher, business development manager, Daedalus, and U.S. government liaison officer, Industrial Designers Society of America; and Rob Deaner, partner at Market Street Sound and vice president of the Pittsburgh Advertising Federation.

A free public symposium, "Focus on Photography: Photography and the Urban Experience," will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday at Carnegie Museum of Art, followed by a reception. The symposium complements two current exhibitions, "Picturing the City: Downtown Pittsburgh, 2007-2010" and "Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story." Galleries will be open until 6:30 p.m.

Speakers include Carnegie curator of photography Linda Benedict-Jones, on how photographers have characterized the urban experience over time; writers Cheryl Finley and Nicole Fleetwood, on the late Teenie Harris; photographers represented in "Picturing the City," including Melissa Farlow, Richard Kelly and Mark Perrott; and artist and landscape architect Walter Hood, who has developed a master plan for the green spaces in the Hill District and is working on a photography-based public art project involving Hill District residents (412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org).

A reminder that Tuesday is the deadline to enter the "Fellowship 12 International Photography Competition" held by Silver Eye Center for Photography. Jurors are center executive director Ellen Fleurov and Julie Saul, owner/director of Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Information and registration: www.silvereye.org.

Fe Gallery, 4102 Butler St., Lawrenceville, will introduce its board of directors, upcoming programming, and new brand during a free open house from 9 to 11 p.m. Saturday. A VIP party precedes the event from 7 to 9 p.m. with food, music and art sale ($75, RSVP at www.fegallery.org).

Kenneth Love's documentary film "Maxo Vanka's Masterpiece: The Murals at St. Nicholas Church" was screened to an appreciative audience of approximately 600 Thursday at Duquesne University. Among attendees were Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald. He hopes to issue a DVD in the spring. Next up for Mr. Love, "Thaddeus Mosley: Sculptor," to debut at the University of Pittsburgh next month.

The exhibition "Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art," which was at the Mattress Factory in 2010-11, will open at Harvard University's W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African American Research today. A public conversation will be led by curators Alejandro de la Fuente and Elio Rodriguez and noted Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.