Museum and Gallery listings for June 7-13
Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events. Museums Brooklyn Museum: ‘LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital’ (through Aug. 11) This preternaturally mature body of work by a 31-year-old photographer connects bedrooms and streetscapes, the suffering of loved ones and the afflictions of a “distressed municipality” (the state’s official term for Ms. Frazier’s hometown, Braddock, Pa.). Simultaneously introspective and extroverted, it’s composed of arresting black-and-white photographs that sometimes look like studio portraits or social documentaries but aren’t fully at home in either category. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Karen Rosenberg) ? Brooklyn Museum: ‘John Singer Sargent Watercolors’ (through July 28) Sargent fans and watercolor hobbyists will be in heaven with this exhibition’s more than 90 watercolors from the first decade of the 20th century, all from the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and all representing picturesque scenes in Europe. Sargent pioneered the kind of loosely gestural yet clearly representational watercolor painting that today’s popular culture adores. He has his detractors, though, who may profit from re-examining their prejudices in light of this beautiful show. 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson) ? Brooklyn Museum: ‘Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui’ (through Aug. 4) Born in Ghana and long a resident of Nigeria where he maintains a productive studio, El Anatsui has for the past decade been creating spectacularly large, fabric-like sculpture from countless numbers of liquor-bottle caps linked together with twists of copper. The work weaves together ideas about colonialism, politics and economics, and is absolutely gorgeous. The Brooklyn show, which originated at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, also includes a number of the artist’s earlier and now-overlooked carved wood pieces, which are well worth studying. 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter) ? International Center of Photography: ‘A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial’ (through Sept. 8) The fourth, and best, edition of the International Center of Photography’s triennial turns out to be that extremely rare thing in New York City these days, an exhibition of contemporary art for adults. The up-to-the-minute emphasis is on the continuing and enveloping impact of digital technology on photography. The results, as seen here, couldn’t be more varied and gripping in content. This is a show that’s in touch with the big, live, real world out there beyond Frieze New York. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Cotter) ? Jewish Museum: ‘Jack Goldstein x 10,000’ (through Sept. 29) The first American museum retrospective of this brilliant but elusive artist, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, is both a celebration and a cautionary tale. It revels in Goldstein’s posthumous influence as it reveals the tragic disconnect of his life and his art, the desire to disappear complicated by an intense careerist drive. This exhibition offers (in addition to paintings, sculptures and Goldstein’s signature films of the late 1970s) a rare look at the early, performance-based films: works like “Milk,” in which the persistent banging of a fist on a table finally topples a glass, or “Spotlight,” in which a beam chases the artist around an empty room. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg) ? Jewish Museum: ‘As it were ... So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue With Barbara Bloom’ (through Aug. 4) Ms. Bloom, invited to organize a show from elements of the museum’s collection, has turned to the Talmud for inspiration. Weaving together real and fictional narratives, historical and literary sources, she creates new and often ambiguous contexts for ceremonial and decorative objects like Torah pointers, Kiddush cups and spice containers. Somehow she manages to quote Nietzsche, Freud, Leonard Cohen, Joan Didion, the Bible and various Wikipedia entries, all without losing her own probing, skeptical voice. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde’ (through Sept. 2) Timed to the centennial of the Armory Show of 1913, this exhibition tells the story of African art’s debut in cutting-edge New York museums and galleries with exceptional candor. It makes clear that early-20th-century Americans received Modern art and African art as a single import, derived from French and Belgian colonies, distilled in Paris and presented on these shores by a few tastemaking dealers and collectors. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘At War With the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston’ (through July 28) In 36 transcendentally beautiful photographs shot in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1970s and early ’80s, this pioneer of color photography captured those kinds of sacred moments when something you ordinarily would pass by without a thought — a children’s swing set overgrown by weeds, an abandoned gas station, a basket of fake flowers hanging on someone’s front door — suddenly takes your breath away. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich’ (through July 7) Born in Cambodia in 1971, Soheap Pich first came to international attention in 2009 with a series of openwork, basketlike rattan sculptures that looked as light as air, but carried serious ideas in images of half-built cities, viscera, flowers and bombs. His impressive Met show is embedded in the permanent Asian collection. It starts outside the Chinese painting galleries, continues in mezzanine space usually devoted to South Asian material, and concludes in the galleries of Southeast Asian art with a gorgeous suspended Buddha. (An exhibition of new work is on view through June 14 at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, in Chelsea.) (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Civil War and American Art’ (through Sept. 2) If you’ve seen “Photography and the American Civil War” at the Met, you might suppose that viewing another exhibition about the war would be redundant. It’s not. With outstanding works by Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford and Winslow Homer, this gripping show sheds expansive light on the nation’s experience of its own fratricidal conflict. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson) Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Photography and the American Civil War’ (through Sept. 2) As intellectually fascinating as it is emotionally wrenching, this exhibition is sure to be remembered as one of the great museum photography shows ever. Its more than 200 photographs include expansive images of battlefields and war-ruined towns; wallet-size portraits of soldiers; preciously framed daguerreotypes; political campaign buttons; a doctor’s documents of horrifically wounded soldiers; portraits of loved ones in lockets; and a series depicting the hanging of five co-conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by the photographer Alexander Gardner. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson) Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ (through Aug. 14) This entertaining exhibition proves that high fashion rarely looks quite as frivolous and cluelessly 1 percent-ish as when it upgrades aspects of the obstreperous punk sartorial mode, adding gold-plated safety pins, careful rips and holes, and a feigned DIY look that can involve materials like garbage bags or cellophane. Cleverness abounds. A few designers absorb and transform punk attributes, but most garments simplistically scream punk. Not for nothing do they call the show’s organizing department the Costume Institute. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Roof Garden Commission: Imran Qureshi’ (through Nov. 3) Visitors to the Met’s rooftop will discover something shocking: the stone terrace is splattered with paint the color of dried blood so that it resembles the scene of some terrible crime. Looking closer at the areas of spillage, viewers will find they have been delicately altered. With deft white and red brushstrokes, the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi has worked into the raw paint a pattern suggestive of leafy shrubbery and flower petals, turning the whole into a politically fraught, allegorical mix symbolizing dualities of life and death and hope and despair. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson) ? Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Velázquez’s Portrait of Duke Francesco I d’Este: A Masterpiece from the Galleria Estense, Modena’ (through July 14) This single-painting exhibition highlights a portrait made at a delicate diplomatic moment during the Thirty Years’ War; the painting is on loan to the Met in part because the museum that normally houses it, the Galleria Estense in Modena, is repairing damage from a 2012 earthquake in the region. It’s a chance to see another commanding Velázquez at this already well-stocked museum, and to appreciate that this artist’s politically savvy portraits are more than just tools of statesmanship. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg) ? MoMA PS1: ‘Expo 1: New York’ (through Sept. 2) A sprawling, multisite extravaganza including a multitude of installations, shows-within-shows and events, “Expo 1: New York” offers few answers but raises many provocative questions about the current and future state of our planet’s unsettled human and natural ecology. Attractions at PS1 range from a beautiful show of pictures by the beloved nature photographer Ansel Adams to a refrigerated room containing chunks from an Icelandic glacier by Olafur Eliasson. On 53rd Street, next to the Museum of Modern Art, “Rain Room” invites viewers into a chamber where steady precipitation ceases wherever bodies are detected by high-tech hardware. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, (718) 784-2084, ps1.org. (Johnson) ? Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney’ (through Sept. 2) With its Gospels and reliquaries, the Morgan Library is at the right place for the first survey of graphic work by the most medievalizing of American contemporary artists. Encased in thick, pale, plastic frames, Mr. Barney’s drawings of the past two decades have the look of precious pages from sacred books displayed on iPads. His images, with their emphasis on redemption through fleshly mortification, suggest sources in heroic epics and penitential religion, filtered through Sade and extreme sports. A display of collagelike storyboards for his films confirms the occult glamour of the personal cosmology he has developed, which feels as artificial and addictive as a video game. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Cotter) ? Museum of Modern Art: ‘Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store’ and ‘Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum, Ray Gun Wing’ (through Aug. 5) Pop Art is based on two things: ordinariness and eating. It’s about daily consumption; the democratic appetite, ravenous for meat, sweets, life on the street, and getting more of everything, cheap. No artist cooked up a tastier version of the primal Pop recipe than Claes Oldenburg did in New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The art he made in that brief, fecund time is the focus of a two-meals-for-the-price-of-one MoMA feast. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter) ? Museum of Modern Art: ‘Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light’ (through Aug. 12) With nearly 160 works ranging from photographs of London in the 1930s and during World War II to nearly abstract Surrealist nudes from the 1950s and ’60s, this impeccable survey makes a strong if slightly over-edited argument for Brandt as one of the founders of modern photography. It sticks to vintage prints and brings a wonderful lucidity to a persistent balance of art and humanity that is, as it is frequently described: strange, mysterious and irresistible. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith) Museum of Modern Art: ‘Performing Histories (1)’ (through Aug. 5) An awareness of the uprisings, protests, occupations and revolutions erupting around the globe is present in “Performing Histories (1),” a show of video, film and photographic work recently acquired by MoMA. Insurrection and resistance pervade the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu’s film “Dialogue With Ceausescu” (1978), while the feminist personal as political is employed in Martha Rosler’s “She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day” (1976) and Sharon Hayes’s four-channel video “The Interpreter Project” (2001). Andrea Fraser’s two videos connect politics and the museum. In one she describes how scientific philanthropy in the 19th century directed wealth to museums and other public institutions rather than the poor, while another video delves into how MoMA itself interacted with revolutionaries and communists, like the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Martha Schwendener) New Museum: ‘Adhocracy’ (through July 7) The term “adhocracy” was coined by the futurologist Alvin Toffler, who predicted that innovative, ad hoc forms of organization would replace more bureaucratically entrenched structures in business and government. This crowded design exhibition presents a variety of self-empowering things that people can make and do for themselves like build their own furniture and bicycles; make new appliances from functional parts of old, broken ones; raise money for bigger projects by means of Kickstarter; and, more problematically, make their own functional handguns using 3-D printers. 231 Bowery, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Johnson) Galleries: Uptown ? Paul McCarthy: ‘Life Cast’ (through July 26) One of the outstanding shows of the artist’s career is best viewed as a single piece. Three fanatically realistic life-size sculptures of naked humans are paired with two video installations that reveal the meticulous casting process behind their ecstatic, mysterious exactitude. The piece is a homage to — but also perhaps penance for — Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés” and its obsessive focus on the female sex. Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan, (212) 794-4970, hauserwirth.com. (Smith) ‘Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’ (through Aug. 11) This sometimes arcane but highly effective assemblage of rare furnishings, artifacts and a smattering of art and printed matter resurrects a once-renowned French interior designer whose collections — and displays — of 18th-century French decorative material and Medieval art were purchased en bloc by J.P.Morgan and given to the Met. They formed the nuclei of the museum’s holdings in these areas, helped shape its departmental structure and influenced the arrangement of its galleries in numerous ways. Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan, (212) 501-3023, bgc.bard.edu. (Smith) Galleries: Chelsea Laddie John Dill: ‘Elementary’ (through July 26) At the end of the 1960s the West Coast Light and Space artist Laddie John Dill began producing electric light works out of blown glass tubes in a lush palette of jewel-bright colors. Here, nine of these works, all from 1971, are installed in one room at regular intervals creating a trippy visual chamber music. Elsewhere, glowing constructions of glass panes in geometric arrangements could be models for updates of Stonehenge, monuments for a new cosmic paganism. Nyehaus, 358 West 20th Street, (212) 366-4493, nyehaus.com. (Johnson) Rodney Graham (through June 15) In four giant photographic transparencies mounted on lightboxes, the versatile Vancouver artist Mr. Graham ponders a man’s middle age with comical ennui. Each is a fictional self-portrait of the artist as a construction worker, a scientist, an aging punk and an old hippie in a kayak. They are funny and touching because of the disproportionate relationship between their grandiose scale and their goofy images, which resemble those of downbeat Father’s Day greeting cards. 303 Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, (212) 255-1121, 303gallery.com. (Johnson) Jeff Koons: ‘New Paintings and Sculptures’ (through June 29) Hastily assembled as a retort to Mr. Koons’s “Gazing Ball” exhibition now at David Zwirner, this exhibition reveals the artist to be both highly productive and uneven. His Photo Realist paintings are uniformly lifeless. The best works are a magenta stainless steel balloon sculpture inspired by the Venus of Willendorf and an inflatable gorilla, rendered in a dark material that resembles plastic or bronze but is actually polished granite. Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, (212) 741-1111, gagosian.com. (Smith) Jeff Koons: ‘Gazing Ball’ (through June 29) In his latest series, the artist everyone loves to hate could be said to revisit his “Banality” series of the late 1980s. He appropriates blazing white plaster casts of well-known Greco-Roman sculptures — the “Farnese Hercules,” “Sleeping Satyr (Barberini Faun)” and “Belvedere Torso” — and accents each with a blue mirrored ball of the yard-ornament variety to add irony and visual pizazz. Fighting cliché with cliché, they are neither especially good or bad, just average Koons. David Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street, (212) 727-2070, davidzwirner.com. (Smith) Marc Quinn: ‘All the Time in the World’ (through June 29) Four much enlarged, bronze sculptures of seashells made by high-tech 3-D replication seem, at first, like pointless baubles for rich collectors. But they reveal an unexpected inner beauty both literal and metaphorical, as their polished interiors cause their interiors to warmly glow as if supernaturally illuminated from within. Implicitly vaginal, these seeming products of phallic ambition become objects of oceanic, feminine mystery. Mary Boone, 541 West 24th Street, (212) 752-2929, maryboonegallery.com. (Johnson) ? Richard Serra: ‘Early Work’ (through June 15) This terrific exhibition looks back on five formative years in the career of Mr. Serra, one of the world’s most admired living sculptors. One room contains objects made of lead, rubber, wood and stone produced by basic actions like cutting, folding and tearing. A second gallery features works made by propping up 4-by-4-foot lead panels and a single slab of hot-rolled steel, 8 feet tall and 24 feet long, that juts from a corner into the room with grand implacability. David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, (212) 517-8677, davidzwirner.com. (Johnson) ? Wolfgang Tillmans (through June 22) The nomadic German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans addresses globalization in a curiously offhand way. This is true even in his latest works, which assert themselves more strongly as art objects thanks to Mr. Tillmans’s experiments with inkjet printing; they are lush and almost painterly in their rich concentrations of pigment. Only after connecting the dots of the installation — which moves from downtown Los Angeles to Kilimanjaro, a Masai hut to a construction site in Shanghai, a car headlight to a close-up of mold spores — do you sense transformation and upheaval. Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, (212) 627-6000, andrearosengallery.com. (Rosenberg) Robert Zakanitch: ‘Hanging Gardens’ (through June 15) The veteran Pattern and Decoration painter is showing flower-filled works in gouache and colored pencil on immense pieces of unframed paper. The dense cascading blooms — based on wisteria or largely invented — fill the surface, conjuring the exquisitely botanical, the nearly abstract and wallpaper, often at the same time. Light flows through their ravishing abundance. Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 520 West 27th Street, (212) 966-6676, nancyhoffmangallery.com. (Smith) Galleries: SoHo ? ‘Mel Bochner: Proposition and Process: A Theory of Sculpture (1968-1973)’ (through June 29) This beautiful exhibition is a veritable time capsule. It shows the artist’s pioneering Conceptual works in a setting redolent of the early artist-oriented, pre-retail era of SoHo — which is when they were made. Defiantly modest, they parse Minimalist space, measuring it openly with non-Minimalist objects (small stones, walnuts, burned matches) often annotated with writing or drawing in chalk, repeatedly locating the place where language, counting and dimensional experience overlap, to the confusion and excitement of eye and mind. Peter Freeman, 140 Grand Street, between Crosby and Lafayette Streets, (212) 966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com. (Smith) Andreas Schulze: ‘Windows’ (through June 23) After a 13-year absence from New York, this terrific German artist has had two exhibitions at this gallery in 14 months. The second features deadpan renderings of recognizably Northern European windows, stoutly framed, often with sturdy metal handles and, always, a view that suggests the arrival of cloud-parting light. The basic nature of painting as a window on an illusionistic world is evoked, with the handles signaling both our disbelief and its suspension. Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, (212) 279-9219, teamgal.com. (Smith) Galleries: Other Jane Alexander: ‘Surveys (From the Cape of Good Hope)’ (through July 29) The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is an occupied zone this spring, with a transient population of unearthly beings camped out in its chapels and aisles. Neither angels nor devils, though suggesting both, the figures in the sculptural tableaus and related photographs were all created by the South African artist Jane Alexander. And while haunted by her country’s history of apartheid, the work has no single meaning, no sum-upable content. Instead, painstakingly calibrated ambiguity leaves this strange and wonderful show open to political speculation and spiritual interpretation. Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street, Morningside Heights, (212) 316-7490, stjohndivine.org. (Cotter) Aiko Hachisuka (through next Friday) The five colorful works in this New York debut distinguish themselves from the increasingly crowded field of stuffed fabric sculptures with their deliberation, complexity and wonderful sleights of hand. From certain viewpoints, they suggest giant, colorfully glazed ceramic planters or tangled bodies but are actually individually stuffed garments carefully stitched together, with paint applied in random shardlike patterns. Soft, cuddly friendliness contrasts with astute, slightly mysterious art-making. Eleven Rivington, 11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, (212) 982-1930, elevenrivington.com. (Smith) ? Simon Dinnerstein: ‘The Fulbright Triptych’ (ongoing) This little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism was begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright fellowship in Germany in 1971 and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children’s drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights. German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue, at 49th Street, (212) 610-9700, germany.info. (Smith) Margaret Weber (through June 23) Recycled industrial carpets are Ms. Weber’s thing. In her impressive solo debut she methodically picks apart big swaths of them, layer by layer and thread by thread. Her subtractive handiwork relaxes these slyly pictorial postminimal artworks that retain something of their previous corporate status. Especially indicative of her eco-friendly reverse craft is “Eater,” which resembles an unusually elegant version of 1970s fiber art. Ramiken Crucible, 389 Grand Street, Lower East Side, (917) 434-4245, ramikencrucible.com. (Smith) Out of Town Montclair Art Museum: ‘The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913’ (through June 16) The Armory Show opened 100 years ago in Manhattan, introducing to Americans the shocking works of van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp and other European avant-gardists along with less adventurous efforts by hundreds of homegrown artists. This much more modest, centennial show presents a selection of works by artists who were included, most of them Americans. Paintings by Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley and John Sloan stand out, but a small, vibrant pastoral scene by Matisse shows how far behind the avant-garde curve the Americans lagged. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, N.J., (973) 746-5555, montclairartmuseum.org. (Johnson) Montclair Art Museum: ‘Oscar Bluemner’s America: Picturing Paterson, New Jersey’ (through June 16) This lovely, small show presents works dating from 1910 to 1917 when the American Modernist Bluemner was catching up on European avant-garde developments. He combined realism and Cubism in paintings of farm buildings in rural landscapes and the industrial architecture of Paterson, his hometown. Favoring glowing reds and blues and opaque blacks, he painted images that seem illuminated from within like modern stained-glass windows. 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, N.J., (973) 746-5555, montclairartmuseum.org. (Johnson) ? Smithsonian American Art Museum: ‘Nam June Paik: Global Visionary’ (through Aug. 11) Including a large and fascinating trove of material from the Nam June Paik archive, acquired by the Smithsonian from the artist’s estate in 2009, this survey of the avant-garde musician, multimedia wizard and video art pioneer (1932-2006) looks startlingly current despite the preponderance of analog televisions and other obsolete hardware. It makes clear that contemporary artists like Christian Marclay, Jon Kessler, Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Haroon Mirza owe a great deal to Mr. Paik’s tweaked TV sets and frenetic, technically innovative videos. Eighth and F Streets NW, Washington, (202) 633-1000, americanart.si.edu. (Rosenberg) Last Chance ‘Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina’ (closes on Sunday) Albrecht Dürer had it all: the eye of a Raphael, the brains of a Leonardo, the looks of a cleaned-up Kurt Cobain. Traditionally, the category of great artist implies great painter, and Dürer was that, though there’s reason to think that he was at his most inventive, involved and expansive in his works on paper. Evidence for that argument is in this startlingly generous loan exhibition of more than 100 works on paper that includes some of his best known images. National Gallery of Art, on the National Mall, between Third and Seventh Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, (202) 737-4215, nga.gov. (Cotter) ? Japan Society: ‘Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints’ (closes on Sunday) Contemporary provocateurs could learn a thing or two from the venerable artists in “Edo Pop,” who mixed high and low culture in arch and urbane ways. In this show’s 100 or so ukiyo-e, or color woodblock prints (drawn from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts), valiant samurai turn out to be Kabuki actors in costume; refined landscapes depict well-trodden tourist sites; and images of classical beauties accompanied by poems are more often than not portraits of courtesans. These spirited images bring to life Edo Japan’s “floating world,” a sort of Renaissance of popular entertainment. 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan, (212) 832-1155, japansociety.org. (Rosenberg) ‘Ellsworth Kelly: Singular Forms, 1966-2009’ (through Saturday) A lively nine-work survey of the artist’s long involvement with irregularly shaped canvases and metal reliefs and monochrome colors begins with the insouciant “Yellow Piece” — a diamond with two rounded corners — and concludes with “Blue Curves,” which resembles a capital B with erotic undercurrents. Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan, (212) 861-0020, mnuchingallery.com. (Smith) ? Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art From the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection’ (closes on Sunday) One good turn generates another: the gift of a beloved, finely calibrated collection of American outsider art to a major encyclopedic museum is celebrated with an equally excellent exhibition of the same. It displays around 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and assemblages, made mostly from the 1930s to the ’80s by 27 outsiders, both renowned and less prominent. All are seen here at or close to their best, pressing against the increasingly unjustifiable division between outsider and inside. 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Smith) Sara VanDerBeek (closes on Saturday) With two glamorous installations of photographs and minimalist sculptures, Ms. VanDerBeek contributes to the Postmodern endgame tradition of art reflecting on itself. In the biggest gallery four white columns reflected in mirror glass covering large, abstract, vaguely cosmic photographs call to mind the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife turned into when, contrary to divine command, looked back to the corrupt city of Sodom. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-7100, metropictures.com. (Johnson) Don Voisine (closes on Sunday) With hard-won control, this veteran abstractionist puts his carefully layered, impeccably painted black geometric shapes through their paces, illuminating a rich fusion of Modernist sources with a meticulous exploration of the mechanics of painting in the process. His efforts enact telling dramas of space, texture, color, edge and light — all of painting’s grand illusions — especially when given your undivided attention. McKenzie Fine Art Inc., 55 Orchard Street near Grand Street, Lower East Side, (212) 989-5467, mckenziefineart.com. (Smith)