Tweaking history at DeCordova

But they are all part of what curator Toby Kamps of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, which organized the show, describes as a resurgence of folk themes in American art.

The show includes stars of contemporary art such as Kara Walker, Matthew Day Jackson, and the late Jeremy Blake, along with such less well-known but equally impressive artists as Brad Kahlhamer, Barnaby Furnas, and Dario Robleto. It presents paintings, animated puppetry, collage, and even spinning dresses in works that address - often with scathing irony - major themes in American history, from the founding fathers, slavery, and the Civil War through the space race.

There’s also work that deliberately borrows from actual folk art, with various motives and degrees of success: Deborah Grant, for instance, “samples’’ the art of Bill Traylor, a self-taught artist and former slave from Alabama, while Kahlhamer amalgamates Native American iconography and Americana in large-scale drawings in watercolor and ink.

The show takes its title from Greil Marcus’s book of the same name (originally published as “Invisible Republic’’) about Bob Dylan and The Band’s “Basement Tapes.’’ Like the book, the exhibition has a tendentious, straining quality, and it occasionally veers off into unhinged theater and paranoia. But it is never less than entertaining.

Be aware: “folklore,’’ for Kamps, is a loaded term. He is not interested in benign, feel-good alternative traditions, like doily-making or Shaker chairs. He is interested, instead, in stories that are at once highly charged and actively repressed, with volatile ramifications.

There is no better example than the handful of works by the brilliant young Texan Dario Robleto, who is given a room to himself in the upstairs galleries (this is the first time, by the way, that the DeCordova has given over its entire indoor gallery space to a single show).