The Studio Museum in Harlem traces its roots to its artist-in-residence program, which culminates annually in an exhibition of work produced on the premises. “Midnight’s Daydream,” which marshals the output of artists Titus Kaphar, Wardell Milan II, and Demetrius Oliver, is the latest such exhibition. The show’s title is sufficiently elastic to embrace the disparate efforts of the three (all recently minted MFAs), who broadcast their personal delirium in the hope of a receptive audience.

Masculinity is linked to conflict in Mr. Milan’s work. In two dozen small collages, collectively titled “Battle Royale” (2007), Mr. Milan splices together black-and-white photos of boxers, shattered as if by uppercuts, and slumping haphazardly together again. Some are unequivocally vicious; others recall that awkward moment when battered pugilists stagger into an embrace. Bits of gold leaf and overlaid floral stenciling introduce an incongruous decorative element, as if to mock this brutal sport’s pathetic aestheticization of violence.

The artist’s confident handling of black and white, and his interest in the muscular male figure, extends to his drawings. In “Suddenly Last Summer” (2007), Mr. Milan coaxes a range of tonalities from graphite, depicting a cluster of naked men with faces finely rendered in pencil, and torsos and limbs more broadly blocked out in deeper, satiny shades. Their gestures range from savage to tender, playfully mimicking this artist’s virtuosic “touch.”

Mr. Milan abandons the material inventiveness of his drawings, and the compacted formal restraint of his collages, in his large color digital C-prints. These appear to be photos of tabletop dioramas, which are constructed of small objects as well as images culled from print sources. In each, a whirlwind of references — to pop culture, politics, baroque sculpture, fashion, family, bodybuilding — ultimately cancel themselves out. The grand pictorial architecture to which the artist aspires eludes his grasp for now, but he builds on a solid formal foundation.

The work of Mr. Kaphar engages the history of race relations in Europe and the New World. Brainy but heavy-handed, postmodern with a vengeance, the artist does not simply quote from portraits of the past, but repaints them from scratch, manipulating pictorial elements and pairing them to spark a new narrative. At least, that seems to be the plan. Mr. Kaphar’s reduction of painting to illustration is ponderous and claustrophobic, a tiresome, academic mashup of iconographic studies and identity politics.

“Conversation Between Paintings #3: Descent” (2007) couples John Baptiste de Medina’s portrait of a Scottish Jacobite, “James Drummond, 2nd Titular Duke of Perth,” painted around 1700, with “Jean-Baptiste Belley,” Girodet’s likeness of the Senegal-born representative of Santo Domingo to the French parliament, executed about a century later. Rather than glancing skyward, as in the original, here the freakishly languid Belley glares across at Drummond, who is stiffly sheathed in armor.

In the Medina portrait, a young slave gazes raptly upward at the rosy-cheeked, hirsute nobleman, his conspicuous metal collar glinting in the firelight. Mr. Kaphar literally cuts this secondary figure from his amateurish reproduction, and paints him into the modified Girodet canvas. The lad’s ardor is thus directed toward the former slave, citoyen Belley. His shackles are gone. You do the math.

Mr. Oliver, a Brooklyn native, contributes the standout work of the exhibition, “Almanac” (2006–07), a series of 44 photographs hung contiguously on the wall. The work is 50 feet long; reading the piece from end to end induces a semi-hypnotic state, like scanning the cars of a passing train.

Each image is circular in format and, nestled in a black square, resembles the fish-eye effect of the surveillance camera. Oddly indistinct, the images divulge a spartan interior, where someone (presumably the artist) busies himself with fascinatingly mysterious tasks such as arranging sneakers in an empty aquarium and wrapping hammers in bacon. A few of these compositions are nearly abstract. Each and every one is captivating. The photographic lighting apparatus is conspicuous throughout, and eventually it dawns that the camera pointing out at the viewer in each frame has recorded the image in a mirror. The wall text shows this to be the reflective, convex surface of a tea kettle. Mr. Oliver’s unapologetic strangeness is thus in sync with the bleary, elliptical thinking that happens in the studio, late at night, on the dark side of the brain.

Until October 28 (144 W. 125th St., between Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Lenox Avenue, 212-864-4500).