Curated by Bonnie Clearwater

Still known primarily for skirting the boundaries of art and design, Jorge Pardo has gone from remaking a variety of consumer items for what he terms “speculative” purposes to shaping the conditions of perception as such. An underlying logic must connect his disparate work—from his 1997 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which included a small racing boat amid ever-changing displays, to his “breakthrough” pier at the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster and his sculpture-that-is-also-a-house in LA—but what exactly is it? Considering Pardo’s immense ambition and his considerable impact on current production, it is striking that this should be the first major US museum exhibition to grapple with his legacy. The show gathers some sixty works made since 1987 into domestic “vignettes,” emphasizing the curious path that Pardo has negotiated between the logic of site-specificity and that of autonomous art.

— Jan Tumlir

Curated by Dominic Molon

“Please allow me to introduce myself,” squawked Mick Jagger in 1968, and forty years later our love affair with that two-backed beast born of man and guitar—rock ’n’ roll—still burns strong. Spanning those four decades, with art by more than sixty artists from four continents—including Richard Hamilton’s collage Swingeing London 67, 1968–69, and Dan Graham’s seminal video Rock My Religion, 1982–84—this survey of some 125 works shows that rock, with its meretricious cousin pop, contains a lexicon of politics and style coded in mere glances and swaggers. Avoiding simple “cock rock” homage, the show features contributions by a number of female artists—Jutta Koether, Aleksandra Mir, and Linder Sterling, among others. Taking the mosh pit to the museum, this acknowledgment of influence is long overdue.Travels to the Museum of Contemporary art, North Miami, FL, May 31–Sept. 8, 2008.

— Mark Beasley