Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.
Museums
★ American Folk Art Museum: ‘Jubilation | Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined’ (through Sept. 2) Having escaped the ugly, West 53rd Street tomb of a building it inhabited from 2001 to 2011, the American Folk Art Museum has reoccupied its old space on Lincoln Square. This wonderful show of about 100 works from the permanent collection samples all the varieties of artistic expression under the museum’s purview, from portraits and quilts by anonymous craftspeople to otherworldly fantasies envisioned by so-called Outsiders like Henry Darger and Martin Ramírez. The revival of this irreplaceable institution is cause of rejoicing. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue, at 66th Street, (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)
Asia Society and Museum: ‘Sarah Sze: Infinite Line’ (through March 25) Promising a new angle on Sarah Sze’s mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations, this midcareer solo reveals that Ms. Sze, who is Chinese-American, has been profoundly influenced by many forms of Asian art. It also includes some of her rarely exhibited drawings and encourages you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings in space. Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle caps and other throwaway objects that she fashions, with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling landscapes and galactic spirals. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 517-2742, asiasociety.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
★ The Cloisters: ‘The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen From the Isle of Lewis’ (through April 22) In 1831, a farmer on the Isle of Lewis, the largest island of the Outer Hebrides, discovered a lost cache of medieval chess pieces. Today, thanks to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in which Harry and Ron play with magically animated replicas of them, the Lewis Chessmen are world famous. On tour from the British Museum, these adorable, bug-eyed little kings, queens, bishops, knights and warders, each beautifully carved from walrus ivory, are wonderful to examine up close. You don’t have to be a chess player or a Harry Potter fan to love them. 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, Fort Tryon Park, Washington Heights, (212) 923-3700, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Frick Collection: ‘Renoir, Impressionism and Full-Length Painting’ (through May 13) Impressionism, like fashion, is dedicated to the fleeting sensation: this moment’s light, this season’s dress. Yet the works in this exhibition, which transforms the Frick’s mohair-upholstered East Gallery into a runway for Renoir’s soigné Parisians, don’t at first register as Impressionist. With their traditional portrait format and imposing scale, they seem at odds with the modest plein-air paintings that define the movement. Central among them is the Frick’s own Renoir, “La Promenade” (1875-6), in which a stylish young woman guides two equally well-dressed little girls along a public garden path. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Rosenberg)
Frick Collection: ‘White Gold: Highlights From the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain’ (through April 29) Porcelain lovers will not want to miss this show of domestic ware made in Germany in the early 1700s, but the big news is the new wing, the Portico Gallery, that it inaugurates. The Frick has transformed an outdoor colonnade into an indoor exhibition space. Floor to ceiling windows enclose a long, narrow space that feels bigger and airier than its actual 850 square feet. In the small rotunda at one end, a life-size, nude Diana by Jean-Antoine Houdon looks out over the traffic on Fifth Avenue with divine indifference. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org. (Johnson)
International Center of Photography: ‘The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet’ (through May 6) Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed not as political activists, but as political heroes who fell into history by accident. The story began on July 11, 1958, when a Virginia county sheriff and two deputies entered the Lovings’ bedroom at 2 a.m. and arrested them, saying they had violated the Racial Integrity Act. Mr. Villet’s images represent the heyday of social documentary, but also the midcentury photo-essay format. Ms. Loving later became a conscious activist when, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, she made a statement supporting the right to marry, whether “black or white, young or old, gay or straight.” 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Martha Schwendener)
★ International Center of Photography: ‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business’ (through Sept. 2) From the home of Weegee’s voluminous archive, the latest exhibition about this great documentary photographer (1899-1968) revisits his frenetic, formative first decade of work, starting in 1935, when his often sensational images of murder and mayhem appeared in the New York daily newspapers. His penchant for self-promotion; the work of his competitors and peers; the evolution of tabloid journalism; and the great city that was both his subject and his audience are emphasized, with fresh curatorial precision and deftly used touch screens. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Roberta Smith)
★ Jewish Museum: ‘The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951’ (through March 25) One of many artistic casualties of the McCarthy-era blacklists was the Photo League, a New York school and salon for amateur and professional photographers. Its members — among them Weegee, Lisette Model and Aaron Siskind — are now reunited in this stirring show, which traces the group’s history through some 145 vintage photographs. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)’ (through April 15) Serene on the surface but less so underneath, the museum’s first full-dress retrospective of a 20th-century Chinese painter is as much about history as art history. It focuses on an artist, teacher and art historian who helped preserve the ancient tradition of ink painting and then struggled to make it relevant under the Communists, bending it toward propaganda, introducing a new degree of realism and making frequent use of the color red. While fascinating, the show leaves you wondering what he might have accomplished under less encumbered circumstances. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine’ (through March 4) It is not nice to make fun of other people, but it is hard to resist. This fascinating and often amusing show presents about 160 drawings and prints from six centuries in which men and women appear ugly, weird, venal and foolish. The show shies away from troublemaking work by contemporary artists, but examples of exceptional draftsmanship and satiric imagination from the past abound. Watercolors by the great British cartoonists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson alone make a visit rewarding. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini’ (through March 18) This magisterial, intensely thought-provoking show presents about 160 works by the most celebrated masters of 15th-century Italian painting and sculpture. It was a time when ancient Greek and Roman precedents inspired artists to create extraordinarily lively images of people in two and three dimensions. The dialogue between painting and sculpture is especially intriguing. Desiderio da Settignano’s marble bust of a lovely young woman with a strikingly expressive, coquettish expression creates an illusion of fleeting real life that painters could only envy. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video’ (through Aug. 26) This exhibition of 17 contemporary works inspired by museums doesn’t mention Theodor Adorno by name, but it nods toward his ideas in a wall text, which jokes that artists often see museums as “mausoleums, places where art goes to die.” Andrea Fraser’s video “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989) leans toward the anti-museum view, while a 16mm film by Nashashibi/Skaer, the duo of British artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, made by gliding through the Met in the dark with a camera and a flash strobe, treats the museum like a darkened crypt. Lutz Bacher’s video offers another museum tour, while the museum appears in poetically distorted form in photographs by John Pilson, Tim Davis and Lothar Baumgarten. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Schwendener)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Storytelling in Japanese Art’ (through May 6) An uncannily contemporary sense of fluidity, action and emotion courses throughout this captivating exhibition, which traces the Japanese penchant for narrative through hand scrolls, hanging scrolls and books, on to the expanded field of folding screens. The sublime 13th-century ”Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine” alone is a must-see: its five hand scrolls constitute one of the Met’s greatest paintings and have never before been shown together. Return visits are merited. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
★ MoMA PS1: ‘Henry Taylor’ (through April 9) Mr. Taylor, who lives in Los Angeles, paints fast, loose and sensuously on canvases great and small. Portraiture is his work’s center of gravity, African-American life his subject. With exuberant generosity, he portrays friends, relatives, acquaintances from the art world and off the street and heroes of sports and politics. Along the way, he takes in downbeat cityscapes patrolled by cop cars and envisions allegories of spiritual trauma in the Land of the Free. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org. (Johnson)
★ Morgan Library Museum: ‘Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings From the Clement C. Moore Collection’ (through April 29) You won’t see much of Rembrandt in this exhibition of about 90 works on paper, which includes just four drawings attributed to that master. What the show lacks in star power, though, it makes up for with a keen, all-encompassing look at life in the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age (which corresponds, roughly, to the 17th century). Seascapes assert naval dominance; genre scenes show bustling markets and tipsy taverngoers; botanical illustrations tell cautionary tales about economic speculation. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)
★ El Museo del Barrio: ‘Testimonios: 100 Years of Popular Expression’ (through May 6) The city’s premier museum of Latin culture explores its holdings in urban folk art, so-called handicraft and other forms of vernacular expression and comes up with visual gold. Among the kaleidoscopic displays are Puerto Rican santos and the winsome cellophane animals, birds and insects of Gregorio Marzán (1906-97). Splendid textiles include Haitian voodoo banners; densely appliquéd molas and the patchwork scenes called arpilleras, with which Chilean women kept hope alive for disappeared relatives during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. An intoxicating, if sometimes bittersweet, vitality is revealed. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Sanja Ivekovic: Sweet Violence’ (through March 26) This timely and resonant survey familiarizes American audiences with the spare, selfless achievement of this pioneering Croatian artist, born in Zagreb in 1949. Conceptual in style, photo- and performance-based in approach, political in motivation, ardently and precisely feminist, her work makes use of materials at hand — personal photographs, women’s magazines, state-sponsored television, even government surveillance — to dissect different forms of power and illuminate the plight of the powerless, while also presaging familiar developments in appropriation art and relational aesthetics to a startling degree. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Print/Out’ and ‘Printin” ’ (through May 14) “Print/Out” presents printed works by 40 artists and artist groups from the museum’s permanent collection. Produced over the past two decades, most involve public modes of address borrowed from the worlds of advertizing and design and concepts promoting critical suspicion of mainstream media, culture and society. “Printin’,” a related print-focused exhibition, is full of surprises addressing multiple aspects of human experience. With fearless eclecticism, it ranges from a Krazy Kat cartoon by George Herriman to Puritan stocks cut from cardboard by Cady Noland. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art’ (through May 14) This show reunites five of the eight free-standing frescoes that Rivera made for a 1931-2 exhibition at MoMA. Some of these paintings seem ripped from current headlines. In “The Uprising,” protesting laborers are brutally suppressed by uniformed soldiers; the stratified New York cityscape of “Frozen Assets” tops a bank vault with a crowded homeless shelter. Timely as they are, they lack the multitudinous energy and narrative sweep of Rivera’s permanently sited murals. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
Museum of the City of New York: ‘Cecil Beaton: The New York Years’ (through April 22) A British dandy in the Wildean mold, Beaton photographed fashion for Vogue and Vanity Fair; made photographic portraits of rich, famous and glamorous people; drew and painted cartoons, caricatures, fashion illustrations and theatrical sets with a deft hand; published six volumes of his diaries; and won two Oscars for his costume and set designs, for the Hollywood movies “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady.” He spent much time in New York, and this entertaining exhibition surveys what he did here during his five-decade career. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, (212) 534-1672, mcny.org. (Johnson)
Neue Galerie: ‘The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections From the 3rd Century B.C. to the 20th Century/Germany, Austria and France’ (through April 2) Since it opened 10 years ago, the Neue Galerie has stayed true to its narrowly focused mission: to showcase German and Austrian art and design of the early 20th century. But its anniversary exhibition of the collection of the co-founder Ronald S. Lauder covers much more territory. In the dark-wood-paneled gallery on the second floor, for instance, six paintings by Cézanne preside over an imposing installation of arms and armor and 15th- and 16th-century German and Netherlandish portraiture. And a third-floor gallery of Picasso, Matisse and Brancusi amounts to a mini-Museum of Modern Art improbably wedged into a Carrère-and-Hastings town house. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212) 628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Rosenberg)
New Museum: ‘The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial’ (through April 22) The second edition of this survey of young talent, organized by Eungie Joo, is more international than the last one, with artists from Asia and South America and collectives from Africa and the Middle East. Much of the work is made up of small, light formal gestures, unemphatic in tone and socially engaged, though in an unperturbed way that accommodates friendliness and wit. There is also a schedule of performances on- and off-site. An Israeli collective, Public Movement, will stage topical debates around town. Yet another collective, House of Natural Fiber, from Indonesia, plans to demonstrate technology for producing alcoholic beverages and electronic music simultaneously. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)
Noguchi Museum: ‘Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City’ (through April 22) Several artists suggest their visions for the future of Long Island City, ranging from site-specific to silly. Natalie Jeremijenko’s “feral robots” sniff out pollutants in contaminated soil, and she suggests hula hoops filled with wildflower seeds. Rirkrit Tiravanija proposes growing “drivable” grass along a section of Broadway, and Mary Miss focuses on four giant smokestacks that tower over the area and imagines them as an eco-feedback center registering environmental changes visible to the community. 9-01 33rd Road, at Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 204-7088, noguchi.org. (Schwendener)
★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘The Bearden Project’ (through March 11) Of the many New York City events celebrating the Romare Bearden centennial year, the Studio Museum has come up with the best in this sparkling cross-generational shout-out to the artist. In addition to a small handful of superb works by Bearden himself, the show is made up of tributes by a hundred contemporary artists, old and young, who together extend Bearden’s cosmopolitan, griot-to-the-global-village spirit into the future. 144 West 125th Street, Harlem, (212) 864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Uptown
‘Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones’ (through April 15) This wide-ranging survey was assembled by one of the leading milliners in Britain and draws heavily on the incomparable collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It includes fascinating historical material; a survey of 20th- and 21st-century headgear at its most creative (and often most frivolous); and rather too many efforts by the show’s organizer. But what’s good is great: for example, a platterlike feather number from 18th-century London. Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, 18 West 86th Street, (212) 501-3000, bgc.bard.edu. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
★ Catherine Yass: ‘Lighthouse’ (through March 17) Five miles off the English coast rises from the sea the Royal Sovereign lighthouse. Its boxy white cabin seems precariously balanced on a single concrete pillar. The light tower tops out at 90 feet above sea level. This is the subject of “Lighthouse,” a spectacular, 12-minute movie by Ms. Yass, a British specialist in the sublime. We explore the edifice as if through a disembodied eye from near and far and above and below. It is a kinetically and poetically thrilling ride. Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, (212) 315-0470, galerielelong.com. (Johnson)
Galleries: Other
‘Gran Fury: Ready My Lips’ (through March 17) A collective that grew out of Act Up and took its name from a New York City police car, Gran Fury existed from the end of 1989 until the mid-’90s. The political climate of that period informs the show, as well as downtown Manhattan’s landscape of graffiti, posters and stickers. “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” (1990), a series of posters displayed on buses, defied contemporary claims that AIDS could be spread by kissing, while “Read My Lips” turned George H. W. Bush’s famous campaign line into a homoerotic provocation. The haircuts and clothes in the works are dated, but the sentiments overlap powerfully with current activism and the Occupy movement. 80WSE, New York University, 80 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-5747, steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse. (Schwendener)
‘Soto: Paris and Beyond: 1950-1970’ (through March 31) Once a figure of international renown, Jesús Soto is now mostly remembered as a minor Modernist who worked in the overlap among hard-edge abstraction, kinetic art and Op Art. This show will not precipitate a run to revive his reputation, but it does open an intriguing window on the mid-20th-century philosophical landscape of modern art. Still perceptually arresting are constructions from the ’50s, in which you view abstract compositions through similarly painted plexiglass panels. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)
Out of Town
Neuberger Museum of Art: ‘American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, and Their Circle, 1927-1942’ (through April 29) This exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., reunites the Four Musketeers of New York painting: John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. For a time — the 1930s, give or take a few years — these artists linked arms to defend modern American art against the dreariness and insularity of the Depression. One might see this show as an expansion of the first few galleries of the Museum of Modern Art’s recent de Kooning retrospective, with their eerie still lifes and fidgety figure paintings that seemed to collapse abstraction and representation. Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y., (914) 251-6100, neuberger.org. (Rosenberg)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: ‘Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit’ (through April 15) Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) was the first African-American artist to achieve international fame in modern times. After permanently expatriating to France in 1891, he found success as a painter of luminous pictures of biblical subjects. In this informative survey of his career, one piece stands out: an Annunciation in which the angel Gabriel appears to Mary as a burst of yellow light. It is a painting of amazing grace. 118 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, (215) 972-7600, pafa.org. (Johnson)
★ Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Zoe Strauss: Ten Years’ (through April 22) In 2001 the artist Zoe Strauss came up with an unusual idea for an exhibition. It would take place under an elevated section of Interstate 95, in her home city, Philadelphia, and would consist of photographs mounted on the columns that supported the highway. It would be a recurring event, appearing yearly over a decade, and would be free and accessible to the public. That series, “I-95,” is at the core of “Zoe Strauss: Ten Years,” an engaging, parameter-expanding exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and on billboards around the city. In it, the highway links sweeping literary ambition and local interest, lyrical and documentary photography, portraiture and the urban landscape. Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Van Gogh Up Close’ (through May 6) Nature both inspired van Gogh’s extraordinary art and calmed his perpetually jangled nerves, and this modest yet groundbreaking show of 45 often small, unfamiliar canvases — devoted almost entirely to landscapes — examines his crucial connection to its bounty. The selection cuts a narrow, well-organized path through his art, examining the terrains he painted, the often close-up viewpoints he used and the shifting topographies of his paint textures, leading us to the fullness of his achievement along a fresh and eye-opening route. Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Smith)
Last Chance
Bryan Drury: ‘Portraits’ (closes on Saturday) Mr. Drury’s six finely painted, intensely realistic panel paintings appear to be conventionally old-fashioned portraits of middle-aged rich folks. But the closer you look, the weirder they seem. There is a reptilian feeling about them. They might be extraterrestrial beings who have donned human disguises in their mission to take over Earth. Dean Project, 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212) 229-2017, deanproject.com. (Johnson)
Rashid Johnson: ‘Rumble’ (closes on Saturday) As this putative star’s career accelerates, his work becomes slicker and emptier, a pastiche of styles and strategies past and present. The main effect of pieces involving red-oak flooring branded with motifs resembling a rifle’s cross hairs, or mosaic mirrors and bronze reliefs defaced with viscous spews of black, is of glamorous baubles with just the right amount of titillating shock value. Only the unsettling, subtly charged, ultimately poignant combination of swagger and self-mockery of the video “The New Black Yoga” feels genuine. Hauser Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, (212) 794-4970, hauserwirth.com. (Smith)
★ ‘Marble Sculpture From 350 B.C. to Last Week’ and ‘Portraits/Self-Portraits From the 16th to the 21st Century’ (closes on Saturday) Filling nearly four floors of pristine gallery space, these two exhibitions romp in lively, even wicked ways through a succession of periods and styles, with continuity provided by what’s called the “ideal” sculptural material in one case and the human visage in the other. The result is a deliciously nonacademic exercise in looking and a robust reminder that, wherever we may think we are in terms of art, the past is rarely far behind, nor irrelevant. Sperone Westwater, 257 Bowery, Lower East Side, (212) 999-7337, speronewestwater.com. (Smith)
★ Natasza Niedziolka: ‘White Shadow’ (closes on Saturday) In a New York solo debut that is just cause for optimism, this Polish-born, Berlin-based pictorial artist mixes together art and craft, folk traditions and early Modernism to devise spare, colorful still lifes that sometimes involve paint but more often make extensive use of knitting, embroidery, sewing machines and dangling thread. The history of painting and textiles entwine; a raw, witty beauty ensues, along with a sense of an artist proceeding by her own lights. Precedents include Hannah Höch’s angular collages, Anni Albers’s textiles and Rosemarie Trockel’s knit paintings. Horton Gallery, 504 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 243-2663, hortongallery.com. (Smith)
★ Joyce Pensato: ‘Batman Returns’ (closes on Saturday In her latest show of perky cartoon characters gone over to the dark side, the painter Joyce Pensato embraces installation art with the deranged determination of a supervillain — surrounding her canvases with heaps of plush toys and assorted props from the studio. Although the exhibition is titled “Batman Returns,” perhaps in homage to the 1992 Tim Burton film, Ms. Pensato’s vision of the caped crusader is all her own. Her drippy enamel-on-linen paintings of the hero’s mask strip away his trust fund and cave full of bat-gizmos, making him into a mythic, messy presence. Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 680-9467, petzel.com. (Rosenberg)
★ Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: ‘Two Planets/Village and Elsewhere’ (closes on Saturday) Ms. Rasdjarmrearnsook, who lives and works in Thailand, is best known for a series of serene works in which she reads, sings and lectures to cadavers on the subjects of life and death. The more recent videos in her New York solo debut are lighter in tone, as she invited villagers in northern Thailand to comment on famous European paintings. The audience comments — on farming details in Millet’s “Gleaners” and body types in Manet’s “Déjeuner sur L’Herbe” — are practical and hilariously critical in ways that art history could never be. Tyler Rollins Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, 10th floor, Chelsea, (212) 229-9100, trfineart.com. (Cotter)
★ Swiss Institute Contemporary Art: ‘Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’ (closes on Sunday) The first New York show of this lapsed Swiss Conceptualist, who was born in 1945 and represented his country at the 1993 Venice Biennale, is a characteristic mix of benign and barbed, as well as of painting, sculpture and video. The 35 small, delectable paintings of “Landscape” bivouac at the border of art and kitsch, tackling themes of hearth and home, taste and cliché, while a video parade of bottles of schnapps implicates the tourist industry. It’s deceptively tidy, deeply Swiss satire. 18 Wooster Street, near Grand Street, SoHo, (212) 925-2035, swissinstitute.net. (Smith)
★ ‘20th Anniversary Exhibition’ (closes on Saturday) Two decades ago, when Skoto Aghahowa and his wife, Alix du Serech, opened a storefront gallery in SoHo devoted mostly to contemporary art from Africa, their enterprise looked like a long shot. The gallery was way east on Prince Street. SoHo was itching for a mass move to Chelsea. Almost no one knew that Africa even had something called contemporary culture. But that long shot has held steady for two decades, And the gallery, now in Chelsea, is celebrating with a modest survey of some the wonderful artists it has brought us during those years. Skoto Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, fifth floor, Chelsea, (212) 352-8058, skotogallery.com. (Cotter)
Marianne Vitale (closes on Saturday) The performance-driven sculptures in Ms. Vitale’s first solo at Feuer, rustic-looking wooden constructions that have been shot at or set on fire, suggest a strong presence in search of the right vehicle. (You may remember the blunt exhortations of Ms. Vitale’s video manifesto, “Patron,” from the 2010 Whitney Biennial.) The centerpiece, “Burned Bridge,” turns a dead metaphor and a pile of reclaimed lumber into a haunted, commanding artwork. Zach Feuer Gallery, 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 989-7700, zachfeuer.com. (Rosenberg)
Weegee: ‘Naked City’ / Vivian Maier (closes on Saturday) Two careers in street photography — markedly different in sensibility and visibility — are contrasted in side-by-side shows. The raw, exuberant tabloid art of the famous Weegee (1899-1968) is manifest in a display of 125 images from throughout his career. Meanwhile, the secretive, recently discovered photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) took pictures ceaselessly, pursuing a style as unobtrusive as Weegee’s is loud and in your face, but no less assured. Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, Chelsea, (212) 966-3978, stevenkasher.com. (Smith)
★ Doug Wheeler (closes on Saturday) Stepping through the fourth wall into Mr. Wheeler’s luminous, futuristically titled installation “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12” (2012) is like entering a giant marshmallow. Because all surfaces are snowy white, corners seamlessly coved and the whole brightly lighted, it seems as if you are in a space of possibly infinite extent. It might be a preview of the universal divine light into which each of us will merge, according to some mystics, when we die. David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 517-8677, davidzwirner.com. (Johnson)
