Alison M. Gingeras’s sprawling “New Images of Man” reimagined both Peter Selz’s eponymous 1959 show and Edward Steichen’s notorious 1955 extravaganza “The Family of Man,” both held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With forty-three artists, Gingeras demonstrated that in the midcentury as much as now, many artists’ experiences far exceeded those of the “man” the earlier curators imagined. Writing in 1959, Selz explained his exhibition’s context: “The revelations and complexities of mid-twentieth-century life have called forth a profound feeling of solitude and anxiety . . . of life in

Stepping into Lauren Halsey’s latest installation was akin to entering a three-dimensional mise en abyme. The wall-to-wall phantasmagoria—built primarily out of modules of large stacked cubes that were part mirror, part painted sign, part color field—seemed to be constantly in motion as the silver floors, mirrored reflections, and overhead lights animated the images and hues into a kaleidoscopic collage of sculptural media. The experience of moving deeper into the space, through the snaking aisles, was overwhelming, but mesmerizingly so.

Halsey’s subject matter is South Central Los Angeles, often

In 1989, Raul Guerrero visited Canyon de Chelly, a site where Ancestral Puebloans built spectacular dwellings among sheer rock escarpments, and where, nearby, dozens of Diné families continue to live (the United States holds the land in trust for the Navajo Nation). It is a knee-buckling place. Guerrero encountered the striking rock formations and petroglyphs left by the canyon’s many inhabitants over thousands of years—Ancestral Puebloans, Hopi, then Diné. Canyon de Chelly’s natural and man-made features are instantly recognizable from commonly reproduced photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward

Not long after the end of World War II, Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) surveyed the wreckage of Milan and, forgoing nostalgia, started to dream big. A black-and-white photograph included at the entrance to his recent exhibition at Hauser & Wirth showed the artist clambering through the ruined shell of his old studio building with the insouciance of a child on a jungle gym. All around him, the walls left standing seem to be pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet sprays, their tortured surfaces foreshadowing the punctured monochrome paintings that he remains best known for. The first of his “Buchi” (Holes)

Where some of Claire Tabouret’s older paintings represented groups (of debutantes as well as refugees) and couples (pairs of lovers, wrestling children), those hanging in her second show at Night Gallery mostly framed a single sitter in her signature loose, assertive strokes. With captivating immediacy, these works apprehend the mutability of expression as it plays across a face, registering pursed lips and shafts of light animating a cheek just so. “The Pull of the Sun” consisted of so many profiles of the artist’s partner and friends, who seemed to pivot, instinctually, to the source of

Jasper Marsalis’s “♫ A Star Like Any Other—” at Kristina Kite Gallery drew on a similar show he presented at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis this past fall. This exhibition included one more of his large paintings titled Event, and variously numbered from 1 to 4, that depict performative spaces—clubs and arenas, dark spaces. Disco balls, microphones, and beams of colored light fill the large canvases. In Event 1, 2019, silhouetted figures perform behind these components, abstracted into shapes. Event 3, 2020, presents a close-up of an open mouth in front of two microphones; beads of sweat