Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.
Museums
★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Life, Death and Transformation in the Americas’ (continuing) For generations, one of the first things visitors to Brooklyn Museum encountered was the Hall of the Americas, the two-story rotunda right off the main lobby. And when you were in it, you knew you were home. A few years ago during renovations, the museum put the Americas material in storage, but now it’s back in new galleries on the fifth floor. The look is very different — ultraminimalist Arctic white and sky blue — but the 102 objects, from a collection that is a jewel in Brooklyn’s crown, are utterly gripping. 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)
Brooklyn Museum: ‘Go: a community-curated open studio project’ (through Feb. 24) Inspired by ArtPrize, an art competition in Grand Rapids, Mich., that awards money to artists based on votes by the public, and by local open-studios programs, the Brooklyn Museum created a contest in which the award was a spot in this exhibition. More than 1,800 artists registered with the museum; visitors went out to their studios and voted; and the Top 10 artists were whittled down to 5 by Brooklyn Museum curators. The results are less than stellar. “Go” has not unearthed any hidden masters of the borough, but it does raise questions about who should choose what appears in museums and what constitutes “great” art. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Martha Schwendener)
★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui’ (through Aug. 4) Born in Ghana and long a resident of Nigeria where he maintains a productive studio, El Anatsui has for the past decade been creating spectacularly large, fabric-like sculpture from countless numbers of liquor-bottle caps linked together with twists of copper. The work weaves together ideas about colonialism, politics and economics, and is absolutely gorgeous. The Brooklyn show, which originated at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, also includes a number of the artist’s earlier and now-overlooked carved wood pieces, which are well worth studying. 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin’ (through April 21) “Paper is an organic material, almost like human skin,” the artist Zarina Hashmi has said. In her exhibition at the Guggenheim, it’s that and more: paper is sculpture, poetry, currency and, above all, a kind of permanent home for a nomadic spirit. Her art speaks poignantly, though sometimes opaquely, of relocation and exile; works like the 2001 woodcut “Dividing Line” reference the violent 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, while “Ten Thousand Things,” a set of small paper collages recreating works from her oeuvre, nods to Duchamp’s museum-in-a-suitcase. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423 3500, guggenheim.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
Jewish Museum: ‘Sharon Lockhart/Noa Eshkol’ (through March 24) Sharon Lockhart’s film installation is based on the dances by Noa Eshkol (1924-2007), a little-known (in this country) Israeli choreographer who, along with the architect Avraham Wachman, developed a system that uses numbers and symbols to record body movement. Ms. Lockhart’s photographs are of spherical models designed by Ms. Eshkol and Mr. Wachman; ephemera include actual notation, posters announcing Ms. Eshkol’s performances and historical photographs. Textile works on display upstairs were made by Ms. Eshkol later in her life. The total functions as a new project by Ms. Lockhart and as a two-person exhibition, a combination of homage and appropriation that both recuperates a “forgotten” artist and respectfully presents her work and ideas, while simultaneously mining them to create a new body of artwork. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Schwendener)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde’ (through Sept. 2) Timed to the centennial of the Armory Show of 1913, this exhibition tells the story of African art’s debut in cutting-edge New York museums and galleries with exceptional candor. It makes clear that early-20th-century Americans received Modern art and African art as a single import, derived from French and Belgian colonies, distilled in Paris and presented on these shores by a few tastemaking dealers and collectors. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Matisse: In Search of True Painting’ (through March 17) This stunning exhibition skims across the great French modernist’s long, productive career with a mere 49 stellar, often pivotal paintings arranged in pairs or groups according to subject. Examining his penchant for working in series and copying his own canvases, they shed new light on the arduous evolution of Matisse’s seemingly effortless art, forming one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about the artist, or painting in general, that you may ever see. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785-1850’ (through April 21) “Sparkle with repose” was the effect the British artist John Constable said he was after in his landscapes. His French contemporaries had the same idea. Today, Constable’s a star. But León Pallière? Adrien Dauzats? Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy? Only wonkish scholars are likely to know their names. Lucky for them, and for us, that one of those scholars is Whitney Wheelock III, who has a passion for French art from the years between neo-classicism and Romanticism, and a special love for gleaming little oil sketches done out of doors. In 2003 he gave his pictures to the Met, where 50 of them, along with some exquisitely funky genre paintings, make up this small gem of a show. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ MoMA PS1: ‘Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories’ (through April 1) In this midcareer survey, long-enduring forms from the ancient world lend some gravity to the throwaway materials that are now commonplace in contemporary sculpture. You could also say that the precariousness of recent assemblage and installation art haunts Ms. Bhabha’s monstrous, totemic figures, which are typically made of Styrofoam, clay, rubber, wood scraps and wire mesh; either way, the juxtaposition is arresting. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org. (Rosenberg)
★ MoMA PS1: ‘Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk’ (through April 1) Mr. Lanigan-Schmidt makes luminous art out of trash: candy wrappers, cling wrap, reflective plastics, aluminum foil, plastic bottles, beer cans and too many other kinds of cheap refuse to list. As this four-decade retrospective reveals, his devotion to his materials and hobbylike processes has yielded an oeuvre of transcending beauty, eroticized religiosity and poignant autobiography. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org. (Ken Johnson)
MoMA PS1: ‘Now Dig This! Art Black Los Angeles 1960-1980’ (through March 11) This exhibition of works by black artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles during a time of revolutionary changes happening in art and society had its debut at the Hammer Museum last year as part of the citywide extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” Focusing mainly on assemblage, the show includes pieces by Melvin Edwards, Betye Saar, David Hammons and nearly 30 others. It contributes a valuable chapter to the American art history of the last 50 years. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, ps1.org. (Johnson)
★ Morgan Library Museum: ‘Drawing Surrealism’ (through April 21) This sensational show of 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries traces the movement from its early automatist stirrings to the doorstep of Abstract Expressionism. Expanding the field of players with numerous new names, it also has a wonderful clarity, organized according to the techniques that the Surrealists commandeered (collage and photography), breathed life into (frottage, decalcomania and exquisite corpse) and frequently crossbred. It may be among the best encapsulations of Surrealism you will ever see. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’ (through April 8) The 10th artist invited to select an exhibition from the Modern’s collection does the series proud. Installed in three far-flung galleries within the museum’s vaunted painting and sculpture collection, her effort disturbs the march of masterworks by concentrating on photographs, drawings and other works on paper as well as several kinds of design. At every turn it asks what is art, who is an artist and what makes for greatness? (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925’ (through April 15) The pursuit of the holy grail of early modernism at its most feverish is presented as a multiple-medium, multinational effort in this dizzying, magisterial cornucopia. The 350-plus works by 84 artists encompass painting, sculpture, music, poetry, dance, film and photography; alternate between the tentative and the prescient; and capture something of both the terrors and thrills of the project, with clusters of paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian among the high points. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Edvard Munch: The Scream’ (through April 29) A version of Edvard Munch’s “Scream” is on view at this museum for the next six months, having come almost straight from the auction block. Protected by a Plexiglas box, like the Mona Lisa, it has been given a prominent perch opposite van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in the fifth-floor painting and sculpture galleries. There is talk of timed tickets. But if you can put up with all the pageantry, you’ll have a rare chance to get acquainted with “The Scream” in person and in context. The museum has built a mini-exhibition around the work, surrounding it with Munch paintings and prints that amplify its motifs and mood. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Projects 99: Meiro Koizumi’ (through May 6) It would be hard to find another work of contemporary art that protests war with such soulful grace as Meiro Koizumi’s “Defect in Vision” (2011), the main attraction of this small show. This 12-minute, black-and-white video dramatizes a final conversation between a kamikaze pilot and his wife, both of whom are blind, as they eat together in a small, old-world-style dining room. It is a riveting meditation on the doomed, myth-saturated mind of Japan’s warrior class in the last days of World War II. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde’ (through Feb. 25) Modernist art, insurgent and utopian, ignited like a firecracker cluster in cities across the globe in the early 20th century, and Tokyo was one of them. Rising from the ashes after World War II, it produced huge amounts of new art, feisty, fantastic, often politically subversive. And a wave of it comes surging out at you like a blast of sound — half noise, half music — in this surprising exhibition made up of loans from Japan and little-seen material from MoMA’s collection. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Wolfgang Laib: Pollen From Hazelnut’ (through March 11) Mr. Laib is the honeybee of the international art world. Since the 1970s, his trademark activity has been gathering pollen from trees and plants in the countryside near his home in southern Germany. He puts the pollen in bottles and flies to distant places around the world to create ephemeral installations of yellow dust on museum and gallery floors and inseminate the minds of his viewers with thoughts of harmony between human civilization and nature. “Pollen From Hazelnut,” in MoMA’s atrium, is his largest pollen field to date. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Performing Histories (1)’ (through Aug. 5) An awareness of the uprisings, protests, occupations and revolutions erupting around the globe is present in “Performing Histories (1),” a show of video, film and photographic work recently acquired by MoMA. Insurrection and resistance pervade the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu’s film “Dialogue With Ceausescu” (1978), while the feminist personal as political is employed in Martha Rosler’s “She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day” (1976) and Sharon Hayes’s four-channel video “The Interpreter Project” (2001). Andrea Fraser’s two videos connect politics and the museum. In one she describes how scientific philanthropy in the 19th century directed wealth to museums and other public institutions rather than the poor, while another video delves into how MoMA itself interacted with revolutionaries and communists, like the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Schwendener)
Neue Galerie: ‘German Expressionism 1900-1930: Masterpieces From the Neue Galerie Collection’ (through April 22) German Expressionism was a messy, complicated movement, with numerous stylistic and philosophical variations. It’s not easily corralled into a tidy overview, despite the best efforts of the Neue Galerie in this collection show. The installation sorts everything into two groups, using the rubrics of “primitivism” and “modernity.” “Primitivism” seems to mean the gallery of jarringly bright, vigorously brushy paintings by members of the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter; under “modernity” are Neue Sachlichkeit portraits by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and others, made with caustic humor and an eye for the grotesque. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Rubin Museum of Art: ‘Radical Terrain’ (through April 29) The third and last of three beautifully produced, back-to-back mini-surveys in the series Modernist Art From India, this exhibition combines landscape painting done in India in the years following independence in 1947 with recent work by young artists — some South Asian, most not — that corresponds to or comments on the older art. Small in size and unfamiliar in content, the show is large with history. 150 West 17th Street, Chelsea, (212) 620-5000, rmanyc.org. (Cotter)
★ South Street Seaport Museum: ‘Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions’ (through March 31) The American Folk Art Museum presents some 200 works from its unparalleled collection in this beautifully orchestrated exhibition. Paintings, sculpture, textiles, scrimshaw, painted furniture and much, much more are arrayed along themes that reflect the history of Lower Manhattan — seafaring, commerce, social life and that all-important factor, the weather — but not too tightly. Poetic license is taken, yielding an intricate constellation of connected artworks, histories and concerns that highlights one of the city’s great treasures. 12 Fulton Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 748-8600, southstreetseaportmuseum.org, folkartmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘Fore’ (through March 10) In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a dynamite group exhibition called “Freestyle,” which turned out to be the first in a series of shows introducing emerging artists of African-American descent. In the latest edition, “Fore,” organized by three young staff curators, Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith and Thomas J. Lax, covers the waterfront in terms of media, which it samples and mixes with turntablist flair, and in its contents, ranging from abstract to personal to political, sometimes combining all three. Firelei Báez, Sadie Barnette, Crystal Z. Campbell, Zachary Fabri, Yashua Klos, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Valerie Piraino and Nikki Pressley are some of the names to look for. 144 West 125th Street, (212) 864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Sinister Pop’ and ‘Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies’ (through March 31) The dark and truculent mood of this collection show is conversant with recent presentations of Warhol’s death-and-disaster paintings, but the curators make plenty of room for other artists (including photographers). The point is not to cast a pall over Pop as we know it; it’s to find common ground between the winking consumerism of early-1960s art and the antiwar, anti-corporate sentiment of work made later in the decade and into the 1970s. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Blues for Smoke’ (through April 28) As a musical category blues is hard to pin down, and this show makes the job harder, which seems to be its point. It’s saying: blues isn’t a thing; it’s a set of feelings, a state of mind, maybe a state of grace. In origin, it’s African-American, developing with gospel and jazz, and folding into RB, funk and hip-hop. But it has long since become a transethnic, transcultural phenomenon bigger than music, an enveloping aesthetic that includes art. And when you have art by the likes of Zoe Leonard, Kerry James Marshall, Rachel Harrison, Martin Wong, William Pope.L, Alma Thomas, Wu Tsang and David Hammons, you cannot go wrong. Whitney Museum of American Art, (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Chelsea
Paul Laffoley: ‘The Boston Visionary Cell’ (through March 9) Judging by his mandala-type compositions on usually square canvases, Mr. Laffoley has yet to encounter a system of mystical thought he could not absorb into his own project. Profusely annotated with press-on vinyl letters, his works refer to a dizzying array of mental adventurers from Socrates to the Theosophist charlatan Madame Blavatsky. This show is an excellent introduction to one of the most unusual creative minds of our time. Kent Fine Art, 210 West 11th Avenue, between 24th and 25th Streets, (212) 365-9500, kentfineart.net. (Johnson)
★ ‘Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive (Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations)’ (through March 9) Africa is an unstinting source of new photography, of which New York would see little were it not for a few commercial galleries and the Walther Collection. Last fall the Walther, a German foundation with a project space in Chelsea, initiated a series of three consecutive exhibitions under the umbrella title “Distance and Desire: Encounters With the African Archive.” The first show included European ethnographic photography. The current one illustrates how much a product of invention and fantasy ethnography can be. The Walther Collection Project Space, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 718, (212) 352-0683, walthercollection.com. (Cotter)
Song Dong: ‘Doing Nothing’ (through March 2) The artist’s first New York gallery show (spread through two of Pace Gallery’s three spaces on West 25th Street) mostly retraces his early days as a pioneer of the Chinese branch of international Conceptualism with competent if generic videos and photographic pieces that seem slicked up for their current presentation. Best is a quasi-stop-action video of “Doing Nothing,” the wonderful temporary earthwork Mr. Song contributed to last summer’s Documenta 13. Some artists are strongest in the festival format. Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, (212) 255-4040; this portion of the show closes on Saturday. Also at 534 West 25th Street, (212) 929-7000, pacegallery.com. (Smith)
★ Giorgio Griffa: ‘Fragments, 1968-2012’ (through March 2) This Italian painter’s second New York gallery show comes 43 years after his first, reintroducing his subtle, stripped-down works on raw, unstretched, visibly folded canvas. With cryptic batches of repeating lines and strokes in glowing colors, they test how little it takes for something to qualify as a painting. Their spare, idiosyncratic beauty expands the history of Arte Povera and resonates with much abstract painting today. Casey Kaplan, 525 West 21st Street, (212) 645-7335, caseykaplangallery.com. (Smith)
★ Zwelethu Mthethwa: ‘New Works’ (through Feb. 23) The South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa’s gripping portraits strike an unusual public-private balance, whether they are taken outside or in the close quarters of migrant workers’ hostel rooms. This show, his sixth at the Shainman Gallery, opens with new photographs of young men in religious uniforms. Wearing long-sleeved white shirts with contrasting kilts and knee socks, these members of the Nazareth Baptist Church (also known as Shembe) strike confident poses in green meadows. In another recent series, middle-aged women sit beside their hope chests, the contents of which are off-limits to us. Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, (212) 645-1701, jackshainman.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Dieter Roth. Björn Roth (through April 12) Concentrating on the collaborations of the Swiss-German maverick Dieter Roth (1930-98) and his son Bjorn, this sprawling show adds a veneer of class to the inauguration of Chelsea’s latest oversize trophy gallery. Numerous large, messy works noisily navigate the border between art and life. But the best does so quietly: the 128-monitor video piece “Solo Scenes” simply records the elder Roth living out life in his studio-home in Basel. Hauser Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, (212) 790-3900, hauserwirth.com. (Smith)
Suzanne Treister: ‘Hexen 2.0’ (through Feb. 23) This British artist has a unifying theory about everything that would concern a person worried about the current global state of affairs. Ms. Treister delivers her thinking in the form of a set of Tarot cards, each card illustrating in diagrammatic cartoon drawings and handwritten text a person, idea or event that changed the course of 20th-century history. The individually framed, hand-colored prints resemble the efforts of a paranoid hippie. P.P.O.W, 535 West 22nd Street, (212) 647-1044, ppowgallery.com. (Johnson)
Galleries: SoHo
Martin Soto Climent: ‘Mariposas Migratorias (Migratory Butterflies)’ (through March 2) Martin Soto Climent, who is from Mexico City, is a Conceptual sculptor in the mold of Gabriel Orozco and Damián Ortega; his works, like theirs, often produce succinct poetry from the slightest recontexualizations, juxtapositions and alterations of found objects. That’s almost the case in his latest solo show, where the primary material (automobile windshields) and the key metaphor (migratory butterflies) never quite connect. Clifton Benevento, 515 Broadway, between Spring and Broome Streets, SoHo, (212) 431-6325, cliftonbenevento.com. (Rosenberg)
Alexandre Singh: ‘The Pledge’ (through March 13) One of the first projects done in the United States by the French-born, British-raised artist Alexandre Singh was a sprawling, delirious collaboration with Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe titled “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” installed at the Ballroom Marfa in Texas. Mr. Singh’s solo exhibition at the Drawing Center is another full-gallery, somewhat psychedelic installation, albeit a considerably more subdued one. Black-and-white inkjet prints of collages that Mr. Singh made in response to interviews with artists and scientists are arranged like maps and schematics on the gallery’s walls. It’s a sleek display, vibrating with art historical references. But despite the high-tone interview subjects and visual references the show is unsparingly vapid, about as exciting as paging through a design magazine. 35 Wooster Street, Soho, (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org. (Schwendener)
Galleries: Other
‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg’ (through April 6) During two periods in his life — from the early 1950s to about 1964 and from the early ’80s until his death in 1997 — the poet Allen Ginsberg made photographs and added handwritten captions. Images of his now famous pals, including the writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, as well as Neal Cassady, their logorrheic muse, make this show required viewing for Beat fans. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)
‘Andy Kaufman’s 99cent Tour’ (through Feb. 24) Organized in conjunction with an exhibition at Maccarone, this series of evening screenings and discussions will present home movies and various Kaufman concerts and shows in their entirety; delve into his record collection; and examine his preoccupation with professional wrestling. Sundry Kaufman friends, relatives and colleagues as well as interested artists will preside. Participant Inc., 253 East Houston Street, Lower East Side, (212) 254-4334, participantinc.org. (Smith)
★ ‘Looking Back: The 7th White Columns Annual’ (through Feb. 23) This recap of the 2012 art season is by Richard Birkett, the curator at Artists Space, and it’s a smart one, with many unobvious, un-Chelsea choices. There’s only one painting, but a lot that’s painting-like. Sculpture abounds. (Yuji Agematsu, who showed at Real Arts in Brooklyn last spring, has a room hung with tiny street-junk assemblage.) Video and photography are in good supply, as is reading material, with texts by Chris Kraus and Tan Lin. Piece by piece, the show feels cool and abstruse, like a set of conceptual locks to be picked. But there are many rewards and a large overarching one: Mr. Bickett makes the art season past look more interesting in retrospect than it did when it was happening. White Columns, 320 West 13th Street (entrance on Horatio Street), (212) 924-4212, whitecolumns.org. (Cotter)
★ ‘On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman’ (through Feb. 23) As idiosyncratic in format as in content, this exhibition presents the art and artifacts of Andy Kaufman (1949-84), so-called anti-comic, outlying Conceptualist and performance artist and precursor to relational aesthetics. It includes letters, scripts, records (45s and LPs), tour schedules, props, costumes and much else; a selection of television and club clips as well as an interactive component. Each day, a Kaufman friend, colleague or relative has gamely agreed to be present, reminiscing, answering questions and serving as exhibition guide. Maccarone, 630 Greenwich Street, at Morton Street, West Village, (212) 431-4977, maccarone.net. (Smith)
★ Simon Dinnerstein: ‘The Fulbright Triptych’ (ongoing) This little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism was begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright fellowship in Germany in 1971 and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children’s drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights. German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue, at 49th Street, (212) 610-9700, germany.info. (Smith)
Out of Town
★ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: ‘Ai Weiwei: According to What?’ (through Feb. 24) As seen in its first American survey, the work of the lionhearted Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, is no match for his prominent role as a human rights advocate. The sculptures and installation pieces too often adhere to the fashionable international genre of handsome, Conceptually generated artworks. Explanatory labels do much of the heavy lifting, along with historically-charged materials and objects, like Chinese antique furniture and wood from destroyed Qing dynasty temples. The artist’s photographs and videos suggest that his documentary work may be best. On the National Mall, at Independence Avenue Southwest and Seventh Street, Washington, (202) 633-4674, hirshhorn.si.edu; free. (Smith)
★ Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art: ‘Oh, Canada’ (through April 8) Seesawing between bigness and intimacy, the personal and the communal, this 62-artist survey of contemporary art in the Great White North may tell you more about Canada’s identity crisis than it does about Canadian art. A sense of place, if not nationhood, does emerge in stark photographs of Newfoundland by Ned Pratt and Kim Morgan’s hanging latex cast of a lighthouse on Prince Edward Island. Elsewhere, cartoonlike pencil drawings by Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona depict contemporary Inuit life and the artist Amalie Atkins stars in a prairie fairy tale involving musical wolves and bears with golden teeth. 87 Marshall Street, North Adams, (413) 662-2111, massmoca.org. (Rosenberg)
Smithsonian American Art Museum: ‘The Civil War and American Art’ (through April 28) On the surface, this probing, perspective-altering exhibition, one of many events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, looks straightforward, even ordinary. We know most of the paintings and photographs on sight; they’re classics. What we know less well is their meaning within the context of the nation’s single greatest internal catastrophe, and that’s what the show is about. It travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring, running from May 21 to Sept. 2. Eighth and F Streets NW, Washington, (202) 633-7970, americanart.si.edu. (Cotter)
★ Smithsonian American Art Museum: ‘Nam June Paik: Global Visionary’ (through Aug. 11) Including a large and fascinating trove of material from the Nam June Paik archive, acquired by the Smithsonian from the artist’s estate in 2009, this survey of the avant-garde musician, multimedia wizard and video art pioneer (1932-2006) looks startlingly current despite the preponderance of analog televisions and other obsolete hardware. It makes clear that contemporary artists like Christian Marclay, Jon Kessler, Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Haroon Mirza owe a great deal to Mr. Paik’s tweaked TV sets and frenetic, technically innovative videos. Eighth and F Streets NW, Washington, (202) 633-1000, americanart.si.edu. (Rosenberg)
★ Yale University Art Gallery (continuing) In a museum era dominated by vying forces of bad economics and compulsive building, it’s a miracle when something comes out right, which makes the opening of the splendidly renovated and expanded Yale University Art Gallery a happy event. The angels of art, design and budgetary planning were on duty. Everything worked. The country’s oldest university art museum has arrived at a kind institutional ideal of opposites in balance: an encyclopedic teaching museum, big enough to get lost in, small enough for intimate art encounters. New galleries of Indo-Pacific art are a particular attraction, but so are other collections, including one of the countries premier holdings in American art and a small, matchless display of very early Italian Renaissance painting. A special exhibition, “Societe Anonyme: Modernism for America,” made up of Yale-owned material, is on view through July 14. 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, (203) 432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu. (Cotter)
Last Chance
Maya Bloch: ‘here you are’ (closes on Sunday) Borrowing a few weapons from the Surrealists’ arsenal of automatism, Maya Bloch takes aim at the figure in her third solo at Thierry Goldberg. Muddling oil, ink and acrylic, Ms. Bloch generates an impressive range of effects: some faces are marbled, while others have rivulets of watery paint that bring to mind works by Max Ernst. Pieces with multiple figures, all with dark, deep-set eyes and pasty white faces, start to feel formulaic. But the solo characters have distinct personalities, even if their bodies appear to be on the brink of dissolution. Thierry Goldberg Gallery, 103 Norfolk Street, between Rivington and Delancey Streets, Lower East Side, (212) 967-2260, thierrygoldberg.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art’ (closes on Sunday) This big, intellectually enthralling exhibition of Conceptual works from the 1960s and early ’70s is not a conventional museum period survey. Rather, it approximates how the rise of Conceptualism was seen while it was happening by one person: the curator, critic and writer Lucy R. Lippard, who was an extraordinarily energetic participant in and promoter of a trend that brought us the triumph of mind over matter in art. Anyone who wants art to be radically defiant of the market-driven system must see it. 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Daniel Buren: ‘Electricity, paper, vinyl…’ (closes on Saturday) This well-known French Conceptualist, who reduced painting to awning stripes printed on canvas or paper, has probably eked more mileage out of this end-of-painting motif than anyone should rightly expect. In the better of two concurrent solo shows nearly around the corner from each other, he tailors earlier pieces to the gallery’s architecture, creating what are in effect intermittent expanses of wallpaper that alter our sense of a space and create a nice graphic, even decorative punch. Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 456 West 18th Street, Chelsea, (212) 680-9467, petzel.com. (Smith)
Daniel Buren: ‘Electricity Fabric Paint Paper Vinyl’ (closes on Saturday) Here, the French artist Daniel Buren adds several new twists to his signature awning-striped canvas, including sheets of Plexiglas, luminescence and glowing strands of fiber optics. In addition to being arbitrary, conventional art-objects, the results conjure the early-1960s efforts of artists like Frank Stella and Robert Mangold. These pieces might as well be derivative student works that Mr. Buren abandoned to make the site-specific pieces for which he is known. Bortolami, 520 West 20th Street, Chelsea, (212) 727-2050, bortolamigallery.com. (Smith)
★ ‘Hugh Steers’ (closes on Saturday) Early paintings by Hugh Steers, who died in 1995 at 32, were stylistically conservative tableaus about psychological self-discovery. With the coming of AIDS, and his own illness, his art gained a sharp sense of purpose. Some of the pictures here are of single male figures isolated in shadowed rooms; most are of male couples and are set in a narrow bathroom with a claw-foot tub. The work is carried by cinematic strategies — scenes viewed from high overhead or up from below — that create a sense of inescapable enclosure, and by an operatic flare, appropriate to an art that was staging the sovereign emotions (fear, defiance, love and regret) of a desperate time. Alexander Gray Associates, 508 West 26th Street, (212) 399-2636, alexandergray.com. (Cotter)
Maria Loboda: ‘General Electric’ (closes on Saturday) The small, isolated works here, by an artist who contributed a “moving forest” to last summer’s Documenta festival, find natural forces resisting our attempts to tame or harness them. In photographs, traditional English gardens, with their rows of conical shrubberies, are set against marbled backgrounds. More intriguing are the tree branches and clumps of selenite (a mineral found in the desert) that hang from points along the ceiling, and a series of blackened steel bars that define the edges of the gallery. Andrew Kreps, 525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 741-8849, andrewkreps.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘George Bellows’ (closes on Monday) Organized by the National Gallery in Washington, this exhibition starts strong with the lush early paintings of New York City and its residents for which Bellows is justifiably well known. It then devotes more than half its space to a disorganized reprise of his restless but steady artistic decline, which ended with his death in 1925 at 42 from a ruptured appendix. It does little to clarify his achievement, partly because of the short shrift given to his plein air oil studies and late landscape paintings. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ Museum of Arts and Design: ‘Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape and Islamic Art’ (closes on Sunday) The Honolulu estate known as Shangri La is a masterpiece of refined eclecticism. Doris Duke, the owner, referred to it as a “Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian complex.” Whatever you call it, it looks magnificent in this show and the accompanying book. Both combine sparkling new color shots of the home and gardens taken by Tim Street-Porter; architectural documents and vintage photographs; pieces of the collection; and projects by contemporary artists who had residencies at Shangri La (which has served, since Duke’s death in 1993, as the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art). 2 Columbus Circle, (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
New-York Historical Society: ‘John Rogers: American Stories’ (closes on Monday) The sculptor John Rogers (1829-1904) was the Norman Rockwell of his time. For a few decades following the Civil War, his lively, anecdotal, figurative tableaus known as Rogers Groups sold by the tens of thousands to middle- and upper-middle-class folks for about $15 apiece. Including examples of the technically impressive bronze masters from which the multiples were cast in plaster, this exhibition showcases an artist who was as remarkable for his entrepreneurial savvy as for his idealistic vision of life in America. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, (212) 873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Johnson)
John A. Parks: ‘Paint and Memory’ (closes on Saturday) The strange, seemingly innocent paintings that dominate this show are small, based on the artist’s childhood memories and painted with his fingers. The loosely Pointillist, somewhat Vuillardian hazes of color, light and form that result demarcate trees, gardens, brick buildings, puffy clouds and, above all, scrambling children, whose feral energy and natural subversiveness are vividly conveyed. The distinction between illustration and painting is rendered moot by the teeming quality of both surface and subject. 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, 532 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (917) 701-3338, 532gallery.com. (Smith)
★ Richard Ross: ‘Juvenile-in-Justice’ (closes on Saturday) Over the past five years Richard Ross has been photographing juvenile detention facilities across the country and inmates, male and female, most in their mid-teens. Some were imprisoned for violent crimes and would eventually be transferred to adult prisons. Others were in for lesser offenses and less time. Lock-down oversight rather than outreach therapy seems the institutional rule. Conceptually, the show is a sobering trip down the dead-end street that is America’s prison system. Visually, it’s as gripping as any art around, and comes with a memorable epigraph by Booker T. Washington: “The study of art that does not result in making the strong less willing to oppose the weak means little.” Ronald Feldman Fine Art, 31 Mercer Street, SoHo, (212) 226-3232, feldmangallery.com. (Cotter)
Jacolby Satterwhite: ‘The Matriarch’s Rhapsody’ (closes on Saturday) Mr. Satterwhite’s eight-minute video “Reifying Desire 5,” the main attraction of his first solo show in New York, is a hallucinogenic tossed salad of different kinds of animation. In a silver jump suit, Mr. Satterwhite dances athletically through a vertiginous flux of glimmering abstract and representational imagery, including offbeat texts — rendered like rubbery neon signs — from drawings by his mother. Monya Rowe, 504 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-5065, monyarowegallery.com. (Johnson)
