This feels like we just got a present for no reason: a show at the Long Beach Museum of Art about Long Beach. But if “Looking at Long Beach” were a gift, it’d be a stocking stuffer—some geegaw that tastes real good but doesn’t cost much. An orange, say, or a gyroscope (hard to swallow, but keeps you toeing the line), or maybe some of those chocolate coins. That’s because a big source for this—one of the museum’s two current exhibitions, the first since booting longtime director Harold Nelson November for leaning too heavily on crafts—is the museum’s own collection. So yes, there will be ceramics. But this should also be a show that, in some corners, will go a long way toward making people feel satisfied again about the museum. It’s a small show—25 works by 10 artists—that fails if you try spreading it too thin, over the whole city. (Not that you shouldn’t; this is the Long Beach Museum of Art, but that’s maybe a little harsh.) But it is a good little show—perhaps even when what we really need is a good big show. It’ll do.

A few pieces here are real stunners and a few, like beets, are good for you. Start with those, the ceramics—basically, a history of Cal State Long Beach’s highly regarded ceramics program (and thanks for asking about it)—including an untitled offering by Ward Young, the first department head. He gives us a freaked-out vase that starts all Asian-influenced—brown, unglazed exterior, gorgeous blue glaze inside—and then ends like the Ugly American with a base that looks like a cast iron sewer pipe bell. It’s actually not ugly; startling is the word. It changes the way you think about looking at vases.

Then, for the Long Beach, admire artist Grace Clements’ Three Salmon, a neat little earth-tony gouache (a bit like watercolor) that hints at those gorgeous WPA tile mosaic floor murals she did of air routes, at the Long Beach Airport. The ones they carpeted over. (Though you can still see some of her zodiac mosaics on the airport’s second floor.)

Skip lightly past current CSULB ceramics head Tony Marsh’s Crucible Series: a series of blank, forbidding china containers in black and blue that are actually lightened by the assorted white objects they hold. And stare at Michael Chapman’s Houses in Long Beach, an intense oil painting from about 10 years ago that is clearly photo-influenced—but very surreal. This could be almost any street in central Long Beach circa 1952, and his skill at duplicating the past is astonishing.

A grim Robert Frank photograph of a real Long Beach street from 1956 hangs nearby, and it’s nice—short little palm trees that are quintessential Long Beach—but Chapman’s piece is better. His focus is a classic two-story, Foursquare stucco apartment building with front wood-framed picture windows that don’t open, a wide concrete porch and a narrow second-floor balcony. Typical Long Beach; you probably drove past one of these on the way to the museum. The grass is green but browning, and the cement walkways look just like cement walkways. Genius. It could be the most photographic, photogenic painting you’ll see this year.

Which doesn’t mean you should miss Roderick Briggs’ Retired From Service, another oil that shows two vintage planes (maybe DC-3s) parked facing away from each other and already being cannibalized for parts. It’s dreamy, too, and it should remind you of that airplane salvage place off Cherry Avenue and the 405—or how most of Spring Street by the airport used to look. Now, the city is built out, and all we have are our oil paintings.