Painter George Schneeman’s image-and-word collaborations with his poet friends were not made to hang on gallery walls. Nearly all of the 19 works gathered at Tibor de Nagy Gallery come from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Mr. Schneeman hosted frequent dinner parties in his East Village apartment. His guests included poets from the New York School like Anne Waldman, Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett, and Larry Fagin, and many of these images were made during such gatherings.

Though these multi-media works formally resemble certain Dada text-and-image collages, they differ greatly in tone and spirit. Dada was deliberately transgressive, a sort of anarchic protest. Mr. Schneeman’s collaborations are born from a sense of unbounded artistic freedom. They are notable for their private, if not exclusive, character. In them, art becomes an extension of friendship.

This is not to say the artwork is slapdash or mere afterthought. Each image is serious, if “seriousness” is understood as the sincere effort that anyone, even a comedian, puts into his work. No verbal representation can capture the layered idiosyncrasies of the best of these collaborations, and simple description will never do them justice. But here is an attempt.

“Cruises”(1969,in collaboration with Larry Fagin) contains four phrases and four images, each of which governs its own space on the uncrowded white page. In the upper left-hand corner, a newspaper clipping containing the word “Cruises” appears above a black silhouette of a man with an outstretched arm. In the lower left-hand corner, the words “without whales,” again clipped from a printed source, appear above an image of two hands holding a piece of string. At the center of that string sits a bird in outline, its body cut from the image. In the upper right-hand corner, three ovals float freely. Beneath them, the words “On Blank Lines” curve toward an image of two parakeets resting on a bird stand. On the stand’s central pole is written “making lazy circles in the sky”; around the four sides of whose base appear the words “To and/Fro To and/Fro.” And so on.

While it is the unfortunate fate of esoteric, collaborative artwork like Mr. Schneeman’s that it will forever be considered a “minor” achievement, one senses that the artist could hardly care. The pure creativity one encounters in these collaborations is only possible in a raw art that makes no compromises to accommodate public display. These delightful images are an intimate look at the creative impulse.

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One would expect to find an exhibition entitled “A Stereoscopic Vision” in a history or science museum, not a contemporary art gallery. As it turns out, the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center’s current show does not highlight a few eccentric artists’ rediscovery of an obscure 19thcentury optical device. Rather, the misleading title invokes this antique instrument to mask the fact that this is an exhibition of emerging artists whose work is predominantly immature and unpolished artists. But among this mostly unimpressive collection are a few works of considerable promise.

Pedro Cruz-Castro’s “Useless Objects” (2001-3) is an ambitious and intelligent installation, which wrestles with big aesthetic questions. Mr. Cruz-Castro has taken household objects such as a chair, a teapot, a clothes hanger, and a razor blade and has covered them in gauze and dark paint so that they look like papier-mache sculptures. These everyday objects are, of course, far from useless. But as art objects they seem to be. Mr. Cruz-Castro’s work forces us to reexamine the distinction between useful and aesthetic objects, even as it reinforces it.

Joe Fig’s “Brancusi 1928” (2003) is a photograph of a miniature maquette of the Romanian sculptor, by then gray-haired and bearded, standing in his studio, admiring about 20 of his most famous works, including “The Kiss” and a few signature Birds. Almost 30 years later, Brancusi would bequeath his galley and its contents to the French state, on the condition that everything would be displayed exactly as it appeared the day he died. While it is unlikely that any of the artists at the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center will earn such satisfaction, one never knows. In addition to Messrs. Fig and Cruz-Castro, Herb Tam, Yoko Inoue, and Athena Robles look like artists to keep an eye on.