Zany, peripatetic Joan Danziger just doesn’t stop. She’s been creating most of her 91 years, beginning as an abstract painter in New York, soon confined by two-dimensional color on canvas. Once she arrived in the nation’s capital, the Washington Color School was dominant, a decidedly move away from figurative style with a premium put on pigment, line and design. Danziger was far from this reductionist direction, instead she sculpted from her own fanciful imagination. Her fixation has always been on transformation. A massive eagle in the form of a chair, whose wings spread into comfortable arm support, a troupe of acrobatic animals (now installed at the Kennedy Center); ornate, whimsical and brilliantly colored, the installations can be found in private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the DC Commission of Art and Humanities, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Capital Children's Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, and many leading corporate collections. Her retrospective now fills the third floor of the American University Museum at the Katzen Center, a collection of hundreds of pieces borrowed from collectors, institutions that show the wild and whacky world of Joan Danziger. The artist talks fast, with an urgency of someone anxious to move onto the next task. Indeed, she can be found seven days a week, at her table, tools in hand, focused on her newest creation. These days, it’s ravens and beetles, whose wire bases are adorned with shards of glass that Danziger scores and cuts before sculpting. Many of her flock are airborne in her soaring studio at the back of her NW Washington home. Breaking into a proud smile, she says,“My sculptures combine an interplay of the animal strength and beauty of nature with the human spirit.”