Curated by David Moos

Amid the dust kicked up by a Frank Gehry–designed expansion (including board resignations and staff layoffs) the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new contemporary curator, Toronto native David Moos, is launching an “excursion in colour field art.” Canadians have always crowded both the telling and the making of the Color Field saga, from elder painters like Jack Bush to recent scholars like Shep Steiner and Robert Linsley (who does not, unfortunately, contribute to the catalogue). If Moos’s checklist of thirty-six artists (from Helen Frankenthaler to a Charles Long–Stereolab collaboration) seems thinly stretched over vast ground, it at least bides time for the more definitive survey William Agee and David Anfam are preparing for 2007.

— Lane Relyea

Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Thelma Golden

Glenn Ligon has long demonstrated an omnivorous taste for words and images by the likes of Richard Pryor and Adrian Piper. However, this midcareer survey of more than fifty works spanning two decades traces Ligon’s penchant for gobbling up and reevaluating his own earlier output. Condition Report, 2000, for example, is based on a conservator’s assessment of a painting from twelve years before, while other works find Ligon meditating more generally on the theme of revision. A catalogue with contributions by Wayne Koestenbaum and Mark Nash, among others, promises to shed light on Ligon’s conspicuous self-consumption.

Travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Jan. 14–Apr. 2, 2006; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Sept. 30–Dec. 31, 2006; and other venues.

— Scott Rothkopf