New York

· Olafur Eliasson

· "Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s"

· "Polaroids: Mapplethorpe"

· "Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976"

Chicago

· Karen Kilimnik

Los Angeles

· Kara Walker

· Lawrence Weiner

San Francisco

· Tino Sehgal

Cambridge, MA

· Chantal Akerman

Minneapolis

· Richard Prince

Philadelphia

· Frida Kahlo

· "Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators)

Fort Worth

· Martin Puryear

Elsewhere

· Takashi Murakami

· "On Procession"

Olafur Eliasson

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through June 30

Few artists produce work as conceptually rigorous and simultaneously crowd-pleasing as Olafur Eliasson, who makes art in which capital-P Phenomenology traffics freely in fun-house aesthetics. His 2003 Weather Project illuminated nearly two million visitors at Tate Modern with a spectacular artificial sun, but US museumgoers have had precious few opportunities to experience firsthand the viewer involvement so central to Eliasson’s practice. Now, this midcareer retrospective—twenty-two of the artist’s sculptures, photographs, and installations made since 1993—promises to make up for lost time. The catalogue features essays by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Daniel Birnbaum, Pamela M. Lee, and others, as well as a conversation between Eliasson and Robert Irwin.

—Jordan Kantor

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"Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s"

SCULPTURE CENTER
NEW YORK
Through July 28

Alongside the jetty is the tunnel—not spiraling spectacle but subterranean breach. Both forms were equally important for Land art, yet the latter seems especially to have resonated with women artists, structuring works such as Alice Aycock's Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, 1975, and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, 1973–76. This exhibition surveys the projects of Aycock, Holt, and eight other artists, providing a much-needed excavation of works that gesture less toward the sublime than the surreal: Agnes Denes's Wheatfield—A Confrontation, 1982, and Mary Miss's screens and veils from the '70s invoke ecological and mathematical systems as well as narrative and allegorical ones. Catherine Morris assembles eleven sculptures (many not shown since the '70s), alongside models, drawings, and documentation of site-specific projects, aiming to deepen rather than restrict this terrain.

—Michelle Kuo

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"Polaroids: Mapplethorpe"

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK
Through September 07

In her essay for the publication accompanying the Whitney's upcoming presentation of Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroid work, curator Sylvia Wolf illuminates the infamous artist's "lifelong passion for using the camera to penetrate appearances." If the metaphor seems too perfect, given Mapplethorpe's best-known, hypersexual subject matter and allusions, its valences nonetheless acquire unexpected subtlety in this exhibition, which focuses on an underexamined early body of work. Bringing together roughly one hundred Polaroids produced between 1970 and 1975 (many being shown for the first time), the selective survey evidences Mapplethorpe in the making. Here already are the artist's most persistent tropes: faces, flowers, and phalli. Yet these are marked with a tender eye, no less "penetrating" but nonetheless surprisingly fleeting, sometimes even shy.

—Johanna Burton

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"Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976"

JEWISH MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through September 21

Although Abstract Expressionism is hardly undertheorized, this exhibition nevertheless promises a fresh take on those fabled denizens of Tenth Street. Featuring fifty seminal works by thirty-one stalwarts, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Bontecou, the show contextualizes postwar cultural production between the Holocaust and the blithe likes of Levittown. By placing unprecedented emphasis on contemporaneous academic criticism and the mass media, this show—organized in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and with a catalogue featuring contributions by curator Norman L. Kleeblatt, Mark Godfrey, Caroline A. Jones, and others—claims the persistent centrality of social history.

—Suzanne Hudson

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Karen Kilimnik

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through June 08

Karen Kilimnik’s trademark cocktail of ardor and acidity, camp figuration and dispersed installation, pop iconography and historical idioms (most recently, maritime painting and French Empire design) has exerted such a wide influence that this exhibition, her first major US survey, feels long overdue. Curated by Ingrid Schaffner with a generous selection of some eighty works made since the early 1980s—paintings early and recent, scatter pieces from the ’90s, heretofore rarely seen photographs and videos—plus an accompanying catalogue with essays by Wayne Koestenbaum and others, the show should help make up for lost time.

—Elizabeth Schambelan

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Kara Walker

HAMMER MUSEUM
LOS ANGELES
Through May 11

Kara Walker won a MacArthur Award in 1997, and her art—for all its consistent comedy and fury—has seen radical formal experiment since then. Despite her epic history, this show will be the first attempt in the United States to mount a full-scale survey of her work. Arcing a loose narrative from antebellum antics to Hollywood nightmares, the exhibition—curated by Yasmil Raymond and Philippe Vergne—promises some one hundred installations, murals, videos, and works on paper made between 1993 and 2005. The catalogue brims with essays by Vergne and art historians Thomas McEvilley and Robert Storr, among others, as well as an “illustrated lexicon” of Walkeresque themes and a sixteen-page insert by the artist herself.

—Frances Richard

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