Curated by Eric Crosby and Dean Otto

In Nathalie Djurberg’s frenzied stop-motion animations, even innocuous actions—a kiss, a lick—quickly turn violent. The crude, childlike appearance of the Swedish artist’s handmade figures and environments renders her work all the more sinister and unsettling. For “The Parade,” her largest exhibition in an American museum to date, Djurberg explores the social psychology of birds—their mating rituals, flocking patterns, and territorial displays—with eighty-five freestanding mixed-media sculptures and five films (all of which are synced to one incongruously chipper score by Hans Berg). A catalogue with essays by the two curators will supplement Djurberg’s all-new body of work. Taking these strange winged creatures as a point of departure, the artist will undoubtedly present us with a terrifying and exhilarating universe of aviary perversions.

— Miriam Katz

Curated by Corey Keller

Thirty years after Francesca Woodman’s suicide at the age of twenty-two, her oeuvre is being comprehensively presented in its first American exhibition in twenty years. Woodman’s photographs—with their reframing of the relationship between the body and space, and their hybridization of photography and performance—have helped to redefine parameters of feminist art history as well as lead the medium of photography into an expanded field. This retrospective will free Woodman’s work from its habitual imprisonment in agenda-driven discourse by exposing it to a broader viewership, posing new interpretive possibilities. Comprising short video pieces, two artist’s books, and more than 170 photographs, many drawn from the Woodman family collection and some seen for the first time, the exhibition will be complemented by a catalogue with essays by curator Corey Keller, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Jennifer Blessing. Travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Mar. 15–June 16, 2012.

— Jaleh Mansoor

Curated by Jens Hoffmann

Adopting the sturdy New Deal model of the Farm Security Administration project that put Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others to work recording the impact of the Great Depression, the Wattis Institute has asked twelve contemporary photographers to fan out across the US and bring back images of America in its current period of economic uncertainty. Count on Walead Beshty, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Katy Grannan, William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Hank Willis Thomas—a truly impressive roster—to provide illuminating, provocative, and probably contradictory perspectives. Evans’s 1938 book, American Photographs, inspired the show’s title as well as the design of its catalogue; ephemera, films, and photographs by the original FSA documentarians will provide historical context.

— Vince Aletti