Count on Featherstone Center for the Arts to come up with an intriguing concept for its first group show of 2020. The Numbers Speak for Themselves, which opened Friday, called for artworks that include numbers in their compositions.

Forty local artists responded in a wide assortment of media, from seaweed to concrete. In many of the works numbers are incidental to the compositions, as with the movie times on Renée Balter’s painting of the Capawock Theatre, registration numbers on the bows of boats, and addresses on the fronts of buildings.

Other artists put their numbers front and center, often playfully, as in Rebecca Everett’s mixed-media Grapefruit, Lemon and Lime, a small painting with a real supermarket fruit sticker applied to the grapefruit.

Artists found creative ways to include numbers in photographs, paintings, collages and more. — Melissa Knowles

Kathy Poehler’s Song of the Sea is a measure of music rendered in seaweed she gathered along Vineyard shores. The 4/4 time signature and notes were made with Desmarestia, she said, and the leafy G clef with a Sargassum.

“I love making G clefs,” Ms. Poehler said.

In M.C. Lamarre’s Wanderlust, one of the first pieces to sell at the show’s opening Thursday night, what seems from a distance to be the shield for Interstate 95 reveals a fantasia of maps, meticulously cut and assembled.

Maps also appear in works by Rose Gates and the art-making team of Nancy Langman and Victoria Haeselbarth, who turned one into a pleated skirt for their mixed-media sculpture Paris 2020.

Photographer Karen Gourley Lehman, a longtime Featherstone faculty member, takes a deeper look at the relationship between numbers and forms with works that explore the Fibonacci “golden spiral.”

Clock dials made their way into more than one work, including Sarah Moore’s whimsical It’s About Time, with vintage watch faces set into line drawings of various clock cases.

Sculptor Nancy Clarke’s steampunk assemblage Pocket the Music of Time, Set It on Fire is a figure with a clock face over its heart.

Photographers have found numbers elsewhere as well, some with deeper Island meanings. Alice June Thompson’s images include a Vineyard road sign listing distances to several towns and the radio frequency for WMVY painted on the door of its truck.

A couple of artists abandoned numerals entirely. Richard Erickson’s To + To is a puffy-paint sum that adds up to Too, while Madeline Way explores the concept of infinity with a mirrored box.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves is on display through March 15 at Featherstone’s Francine Kelly Gallery, which is open daily in the center’s Art Barn from noon to 4 p.m.

The next theme, for a group show opening March 22, is Here Comes the Sun: The Yellow Show. Artists wishing to exhibit may submit up to three works, incorporating the color yellow, that have not been shown at Featherstone before. For more information, visit featherstoneart.org.