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April 25, 2008 Friday

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Museum and Gallery Listings
BYLINE: By THE NEW YORK TIMES
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; Pg. 5
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ART

'THE HUMAN FACE IS A MONUMENT' Titled after a 1965 movie by the underground filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), ''The Human Face Is a Monument'' is a lively group show at Guild & Greyshkul that could be subtitled ''And Glossy Magazines Are a Feminist Gold Mine.''

May Wilson (1905-1986) is represented by several little-known collages from the late 1960s, whose latticelike layering of images create a kaleidoscopic mix of voyeurism, patterning and interior. In Sarah Charlesworth's ''Figure Drawings,'' a work initiated 20 years ago, 40 small, individually framed figurative silhouettes -- mostly sculptures -- catalog poses, gestures and meanings.

Dana Hoey's latest, possibly transitional, work contrasts different female roles and the passage of time in loose-limbed quilts of images. Sara Greenberger Rafferty uses pictures of fried eggs to accent the absurdity of some of the roles women play. In a 1982 video Martha Rosler dismembers an issue of Vogue magazine, verbally and unaided by scissors. And, finally, ''The Geeks 2008,'' right, a large new work by Anya Kielar, uses fabric, paint and inkjet prints to create pale female silhouettes that invoke both a Greek chorus and the alert, sharp-elbowed women of Picasso's ''Demoiselles D'Avignon.''

In a separate area, collages and films made between 1950 and 1980 by Mr. VanDerBeek -- father of two of the three artists in charge of this gallery -- reverberate with nearly everything on view, reintroducing a neglected artist and confirming that neither feminism nor collage is exclusively female terrain. (Through May 3, Guild & Greyshkul, 28 Wooster Street, at Grand Street, SoHo, 212-625-9224, guildgreyshkul.com.) ROBERTA SMITH

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.

Museums

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM: 'DARGERISM: CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND HENRY DARGER,' through Sept. 21. The great Outsider Henry Darger (1892-1973) was completely unknown as an artist during his own lifetime. Now his epic adventure, ''The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion'' is famous and a big influence on mainstream artists. This intriguing exhibition presents 12 of Darger's gorgeous, bizarre watercolors and works by 11 contemporary artists who have been inspired by him, including Justine Kurland, Trenton Doyle Hancock and, most surprisingly, Paula Rego. 45 West 53rd Street, [phone], folkartmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)

ASIA SOCIETY AND MUSEUM: 'DESIGNED FOR PLEASURE: THE WORLD OF EDO JAPAN IN PRINTS AND PAINTINGS, 1680-1860,' through May 4. Organized by the Japanese Art Society, this show anchors the ''floating world'' of ukiyo-e prints firmly in economic and social reality. It includes works by well-known artists, including Hokusai and Hiroshige, and emphasizes the entrepreneurial role of print publishers and the relationship between printmaking, painting and literature in the Edo period. Because the prints are sensitive to light, ''Designed for Pleasure'' will be shown in two installments. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, [phone], asiasociety.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: '$;MURAKAMI,' through July 13. Bring the kids and the shopping-centered tweens. This survey of Takashi Murakami, the artist frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, has it all: immense, toylike sculptures; an animated cartoon that rivals Disney; and a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique (Brooklyn's first!) selling Murakami bags. But it also elucidates the trajectory of an artist who began by recycling Japanese popular culture and then gradually figured out how to go deeper, harnessing Japanese traditions of painting, craft and spirituality. The art-commerce, high-low conundrums are fun, but the steady improvement in the paintings is the real heart of the matter. Along with the animated cartoons, which should please aesthetes of all ages, there is a moral component as well. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, [phone], brooklynmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: 'UTAGAWA: MASTERS OF THE JAPANESE PRINT, 1770-1900,' through June 15. This fascinating show tells the story of a group of artists that dominated the woodblock print business in Japan for much of the 19th century. Not everything in it is a masterpiece, but among its 95 prints are stunning portraits of actors, geishas and warriors; colorful retellings of old myths; views of contemporary urban life; and gorgeous, poetically captivating landscapes. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, [phone], brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)

COOPER-HEWITT NATIONAL DESIGN MUSEUM: 'ROCOCO: THE CONTINUING CURVE, 1730-2008,' through July 6. This enthralling show has an extraordinarily high sumptuousness quotient. It explores the 18th-century Rococo style and its legacy, with a focus on furniture, ceramic vases, jewelry, mirrors, snuff boxes and other sorts of domestic ware. It includes works from most of the countries that Rococo reached, from Germany to Guatemala; takes in 19th-century Rococo revivals; and pursues the spirit if not the actual style of Rococo into the 20th century and beyond. 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan, [phone], cooperhewitt.org. (Johnson)

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO: 'ART DOES NOT EQUAL LIFE: ACTIONS BY ARTISTS OF THE AMERICAS, 1960-2000,' through May 18. The redefinition of modernism(s) through the illumination of its Latin American manifestations has been one of the joys of the current New York art season. This revelatory addition concentrates on the Happenings, Conceptual and Performance Art and Body Art and video that thrived in Latin America despite, or in response to, dire political and economic situations. With photographic and video documentation in the majority, the toughness and scope of the material, aided by a thoughtful installation, create their own fascination. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, [phone], elmuseo.org. (Smith)

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: 'CAI GUO-QIANG: I WANT TO BELIEVE,' through May 28. This museumwide survey of a leading Chinese artist indicates considerable command of cross-cultural references and extreme appropriation, including a gang of sculptors remaking a classic Social Realist ensemble of life-size figures while you watch. Gunpowder is a favored material, violence a frequent motif. A stop-action installation of seemingly exploding cars hangs in the atrium space. Scores of arrows make pincushions of snarling tigers (stuffed), and there are carved-wood religious sculptures and an entire fishing boat. Videos documenting pyrotechnical land-art pieces go boom. The show has far more than its share of hollow spectacle. The scorched, mural-size gunpowder drawings that combine elements of performance art, Abstract Expressionism and traditional Chinese and Japanese painting are the most believable. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, [phone], guggenheim.org. (Smith)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: 'ARCHIVE FEVER: USES OF THE DOCUMENT IN CONTEMPORARY ART,' through May 4. You need no grounding in art theory to understand the messages generated by this powerful brain-pincher of a theme show. The archive of the title is less a thing or a place than a concept, an immersive environment: the sum total of documentary images, mostly photographic, circulating in the culture, on the street, in the media and finally in what is called the collective memory. From an Andy Warhol silk-screen of a black civil rights demonstrator attacked by police dogs, to a gallery wallpapered with the front pages of international newspapers reporting on the destruction of the twin towers, truth, untruth and their consequences make up the riveting story here. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, [phone], icp.org. (Cotter)

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: 'THE COLLECTIONS OF BARBARA BLOOM,' through May 4. Instead of the walk-in installations for which Ms. Bloom is best known, this survey displays pieces from different phases of her career as discrete works of sculpture, assemblage, collage, photography and design. This is confusing, but attentive viewers will profit from studying her ideologically subversive, dryly humorous and formally inventive play with many different forms of representation, from faux-antique plaster self-portrait busts to a found-object sculpture in the form of a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (See above.) (Johnson)

JAPAN SOCIETY: 'THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE LACQUER: MASTERWORKS BY SHIBATA ZESHIN,' through June 15. In Japan, before there was plastic, there was lacquer. Shiny, waterproof and lightweight, it made an excellent coating for wooden cups, bowls, utensils and food storage containers. In the hands of a skilled, ingenious artisan like Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891) it was a high art. This beautiful show presents almost 75 objects -- many dumbfoundingly sumptuous -- and paintings by this man, considered the greatest of all Japanese lacquer artists. 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan, [phone], japansociety.org. (Johnson)

THE JEWISH MUSEUM: 'WARHOL'S JEWS: TEN PORTRAITS RECONSIDERED,' through Aug. 3. In 1980 Andy Warhol produced a series of portraits of famous Jews, including Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein and the Marx Brothers. When they appeared at the Jewish Museum that year, the critics hated them. But they were warmly received by Jewish audiences when they were exhibited in museums and Jewish institutions around the country. Viewing them in this return engagement, it is hard to imagine anyone growing very excited for or against such bland, posterlike images. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, [phone], thejewishmuseum.org. (Johnson)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'GUSTAVE COURBET,' through May 18. Starting with an amazing if claustrophobic gallery of self-portraits that emphasize Courbet's ambition, attention to the old masters and inborn truculence, this show offers a grand tour of one of 19th-century European painting's most unruly geniuses. Realism, at whose prow he is usually placed, is in many ways the least of it. Several works could easily date from the 20th century, by artists like Balthus, Picabia or Max Ernst. What Courbet made most real was the sheer, implicitly ironic uncanniness of painting itself, which he conveyed in a commanding discombobulation. Some paintings barely hold together; others collapse inward into strange, shapeless masses. No artist before Picasso put so much of himself on canvas; few since have built in so many spatial booby traps, ambiguous feelings or elements of rebellion and dissent. Some were conscious; others were left for us to discover, to feel in our bones. [phone], metmuseum.org. (Smith)

THE MET: 'JASPER JOHNS: GRAY,' through May 4. Since his paintings of targets and American flags took the art world by storm 50 years ago, Jasper Johns has been a cultural fact and the subject of numerous museum exhibitions. But this is one of the best. Moody, opulent and eloquent, it singles out his many paintings in gray, the color at the core of his sensibility, along with numerous sculptures, drawings and prints that are inherently gray. Together they chronicle his maturation from brilliant, methodical young artist to a deeper, more lyrical, less predictable one. And frankly, it is almost a relief to follow the incessant unfolding of this singular career without the brightly colored, better-known masterpieces. (See above.) (Smith)

THE MET: 'POUSSIN AND NATURE: ARCADIAN VISIONS,' through May 11. If a painter can be judged by the love he inspires, Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) was one of art history's great valentines. Corot, Delacroix, Constable and Cezanne all adored him. So did Picasso and Matisse. You can see why in this show of his post-Classical, pre-Romantic landscapes and drawings. Every age has a different style for ''serious'' in art; Poussin's was different from our own, but enthralling and moving in its moral gravity and poise. (See above.) (Cotter)

THE MET: 'SILVERSMITHS TO THE NATION: THOMAS FLETCHER AND SIDNEY GARDINER, 1808-1842,' through May 4. Blending neo-Classical kitsch, patriotic flair and superb craftsmanship, the Philadelphia silversmiths Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner pumped up the genre of the commemorative cup to works of awesome, small-scale monumentalism. Standing almost 30 inches from its hairy paw feet to the furrowed brow of a bellicose eagle mounted on the lid of its soup tureen bowl, an urn made in 1813 to honor Capt. Isaac Hull was at the time the heaviest, tallest and most complex work in silver ever produced in North America. It is still pretty impressive. (See above.) (Johnson)

THE MET: 'TIBETAN ARMS AND ARMOR FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION,' through fall 2009. The paradox of militant Buddhism inspired the Metropolitan's fascinating 2006 exhibition ''Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet.'' Now Donald LaRocca, the museum's arms and armor curator, has created a follow-up installation of 35 objects from the Met's collection (including 5 acquired in 2007). This time the focus is on defense rather than offense: examples of horse and body armor, dating from the 15th through the 20th centuries, outnumber swords, guns and spears. Most of these objects have seen more ceremonial than military action. All of them equate supreme craftsmanship with defense of the body and Buddhist principles. (See above.) (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DIASPORAN ARTS: DREAD SCOTT: 'WELCOME TO AMERICA,' through June 1. Dread Scott's installation with an American flag on the floor caused a flap in 1989 when the first President Bush disapproved, and this New York artist continues to make issue-specific work in a classic political-art mode. The installations, sculptures and videos in this survey dramatize Hurricane Katrina, the incarceration of black males and the Iraq war as if they were all part of a single national problem, and he argues forcefully that they are. 80 Hanson Place, at South Portland Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, [phone], mocada.org. (Cotter)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'COLOR CHART: REINVENTING COLOR, 1950 TO TODAY,' through May 12. Organized by Ann Temkin, a curator in the museum's department of painting and sculpture, color functions as a ready-made in ''Color Chart'' -- something to be bought or appropriated, rather than mixed on a palette. The show is a rejoinder to the notion of color as the province of formalists, and to the idea that Minimal and Conceptual art comes only in shades of black, white and gray. In the upper section of the lobby a floor created by the artist Jim Lambie surrounds concentric strips of brightly hued tape. In the galleries there are postwar classics by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Sherrie Levine. [phone], moma.org. (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AND P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER: 'TAKE YOUR TIME: OLAFUR ELIASSON,' through June 30. Near the end of a decade crammed with junk-art collectibles geared to junk-bond budgets, we get bare walls, open space, light and color in this survey of work by an artist, born in Denmark in 1967, who is well known for creating immaterialist magic through bare-bones means: literally, in some cases, mist and mirrors. As optically enchanting as the results are, though, in the end we are left wanting more from Mr. Eliasson's less. [phone], moma.org; 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, [phone], ps1.org. (Cotter)

NEUE GALERIE: 'GUSTAV KLIMT: THE RONALD S. LAUDER AND SERGE SABARSKY COLLECTIONS,' through June 30. The first New York museum show devoted exclusively to this Viennese master is less a coherent Klimt exhibition than a Klimt-o-rama. The main draw is a veritable retrospective of the drawings, erotic and otherwise, and a smattering of paintings starring the new-in-town, gold-on-gold ''Adele Bloch-Bauer I.'' Also here: a photo mural of sections of Klimt's most famous painted mural, the ''Beethoven Frieze''; a period room; photographs and personal effects, including one of the artist's signature caftans; and piped-in music, all written in Vienna of course, and available for purchase on CD. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, [phone], neuegalerie.org. (Smith)

NEUE GALERIE: 'WIENER WERKSTaTTE JEWELRY,' through June 30. Founded in 1903, the Wiener Werkstatte, or Vienna Workshops, set out to prove that the modern world still needed fine craftsmanship and good design. Its first product was jewelry, of which this stunning exhibition presents 40 gorgeous examples. Works in gold, silver and semi-precious stones by the workshop's co-founders, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, and others -- including, most notably, Dagobert Peche -- magically blur the line between personal ornament and miniature sculpture. 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, [phone], neuegalerie.org. (Johnson)

NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART: 'TOMMA ABTS,' through June 29. The small, hard-edged abstractions by this German-born painter, who is based in London and was the 2006 Turner Prize winner, are not showy, but they are intensely absorbing. Basic, formal elements like stripes, arcs, circles, planes and polygons are carefully layered, juxtaposed and interwoven in all sorts of subtly eccentric ways. Ms. Abts's colors are muted but seductive, and she adds highlights and shadows, creating mysterious, three-dimensional illusions. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, [phone], newmuseum.org. (Johnson)

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES LIBRARY: 'MONUMENTAL FRANCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDOUARD BALDUS' AND SKETCHES ON GLASS: CLICHES-VERRE FROM THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,' through June 28. This pair of exhibitions focuses on the experimental period after the birth of photography (the 1850s through the 1870s). Film had not yet been invented, but glass-plate and paper negatives allowed artists to micromanage the camera's performance or to bypass it entirely. ''Monumental France: The Photographs of Edouard Baldus'' gathers 38 artisanal prints of French architectural landmarks. ''Sketches on Glass: Cliches-Verre From the New York Public Library'' presents prints made with hand-drawn glass plates on light-sensitive paper (no camera required). Together these shows reveal that artists in mid-19th-century France blurred the distinction between the photograph and the unique object. Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, [phone], nypl.org (Rosenberg)

NOGUCHI MUSEUM: 'DESIGN: ISAMU KENMOCHI AND ISAMU NOGUCHI,' through May 25. The Bamboo Basket Chair was the result of a brief collaboration in 1950 between the Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) and the Japanese industrial designer Isamu Kenmochi (1912-71). The chair was never manufactured, and the prototype was lost. The example here was recreated from photographs. Mostly, however, the chair provides an excuse to compare the design careers of Noguchi and Kenmochi and examine their roles in midcentury modern design, as well as the cultural relationship between Japan and the United States. Kenmochi's ''Japanese modern'' furniture is here, as well as a room devoted to Noguchi's most popular design achievement, the Akari light sculptures. 9-01 33rd Road, at Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens, [phone], noguchi.org. (Martha Schwendener)

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER: 'WACK! ART AND THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION,' through May 12. This big, messy, fascinating scrapbook of a show focuses on the years between the mid-1960s and the early '80s, when feminism had its most intense impact on contemporary art. Presenting works by 120 women, it is uneven in quality, but the overall effect is exciting. It takes you back to a heady time when women were throwing out old, patriarchal laws and reinventing art in all kinds of idiosyncratic and sometimes dangerously extreme terms. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, [phone], ps1.org. (Johnson)

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM: 'FLOW,' through June 29. Afropolitanism is the modish tag for recent work by young African artists. What unites them is a shared view of Africa, less as a place than as a concept, a cultural force -- one that runs through the world the way a gulf stream runs through an ocean, part of the whole, but with its own tides and temperatures. This idea, or something like it, lies behind ''Flow,'' a fine-textured survey of 20 artists who, with a few exceptions, were born in Africa after 1970 but who now live in Europe or the United States. The show is a worthy successor to ''Freestyle'' and ''Frequency,'' benchmark surveys of new African-American art. 144 West 125th Street, [phone], studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: 'WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008,' through June 1. This year's light-touch show takes lowered expectations -- lessness, ephemerality and failure, to use the words of its young curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin -- as its theme, and makes at least an appearance of trying to circumvent an object-obsessed market. With 81 artists, this is the smallest Biennial in a while, and feels that way, even as it fills three floors and more of the museum, and continues at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th Street), with a program of installation and performance art. If the overall mix feels uncharismatic, there are good artists on hand, most with work commissioned by the museum for the occasion. In an anti-triumphalist show, uncertainty, political and existential, rules. 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, [phone], whitney.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Uptown

'DAN FLAVIN: THE 1964 GREEN GALLERY EXHIBITION' We're used to seeing Dan Flavin's fluorescent light sculptures in spiffy and august museum settings, where they can look sleek and grand, with no hardware-store bloodlines showing. But when the work initially appeared more than 40 years ago, it made a different impression. And we can sense what it might have been from this re-creation of Mr. Flavin's first solo -- at the Green Gallery, owned by Richard Bellamy, in the late fall of 1964 -- using fluorescent tubing as the sole medium. Zwirner & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, [phone], zwirnerandwirth.com, through May 3. (Cotter)

'WINE, WORSHIP AND SACRIFICE: THE GOLDEN GRAVES OF ANCIENT VANI' In small but elegant new galleries, a study center founded in 2006 under the auspices of New York University presents its inaugural exhibition. This show offers more than 100 objects unearthed from ancient graves in Vani, a cosmopolitan city established in Colchis -- modern-day Georgia -- in the eighth century B.C. It includes beautiful, intricate gold jewelry discovered in grave sites of the rich and powerful; the life-size bronze torso of a youth made in classic Hellenistic style; and two strikingly exotic bronze lamps with functional parts in the form of elephant heads. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th Street, [phone], nyu.edu/isaw, through June 1. (Johnson)

Galleries: Chelsea

ASHLEY BICKERTON In garish digital photographs printed on canvas, partly overpainted and presented within wide, wooden frames elaborately decorated to resemble Indonesian tourist kitsch, Mr. Bickerton stars as an Ugly American in a South Pacific paradise. His skin is blue, and he is accompanied by voluptuous female islanders whose partly nude bodies are painted in tropical hues. The question is, does unchecked hedonism lead to erotic utopia or moral insanity? Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 540 West 26th Street, [phone], lehmannmaupin.com, through May 3. (Johnson)

MCDERMOTT & MCGOUGH: 'DETROIT' The McDermott & McGough Wayback Machine is now parked in the American 1950s. Though predictably campy, the duo's treatment of this destination is impressively suave and emotionally complex. This exhibition at Nicholas Robinson consists of extraordinarily lucid, richly colored staged photographs resembling stills from an old film about teenage love, desire, wanderlust and guilt. Nicholas Robinson, 535 West 20th Street, [phone], nrgallery.com, through May 17. (Johnson)

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI At 64, Mr. Nozkowski has erased the division between geometric and organic form -- an early Modernist bugaboo -- melding them into a signature style unburdened by a signature motif. Each painting feels like a new adventure in shape, space, color and suggested meaning, and also like a joke on Modernist seriousness that is also serious, most of all in its visual richness and telling surface variations. PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, [phone], pacewildenstein.com, through May 3. (Smith)

SCOTT OLSON The small paintings in this artist's first solo show filter a loosely Constructivist geometry through the scale and turned-in concentration of manuscript illumination. Their outsize emphasis on process, amplified by contrasting techniques, colors and surfaces, makes them extra engrossing, especially for canvases not much larger than your face. Taxter & Spengemann, 504 West 22nd Street, [phone], taxterandspengemann.com, through May 10. (Smith)

PIOTR UKLANSKI One of the bad boys of contemporary art goes big time and sustains quite a bit of his badness. Diverse works in a labyrinth of galleries move through the pomp and circumstance of the Communist, Roman Catholic and Modernist beliefs; Polish Christmas traditions; and the Solidarity movement, with a closing reference to the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Germans. Festivalist identity-art spectacle is a target; yet a sense of Polish suffering and pride comes across. Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street, [phone], gagosian.com, through May 17. (Smith)

Galleries: Other

ALICE O'MALLEY: 'COMMUNITY OF ELSEWHERES' An old-style space on the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side gives a sense of undergrounds present or recently past in this show of Alice O'Malley's full-length portrait photographs. Artists (Nicole Eisenman, Justine Kurland, Jocelyn Taylor); poets (Eileen Myles); performers (Dean Johnson); party givers (Kenny Kenny); and professional partygoers (Viva) mingle in a display organized by the singer Antony that catches a still gritty cross-dressing, reverse-grandeur moment that wasn't so long ago -- about 2001 -- but is fading fast. Participant Inc., 253 East Houston Street, [phone], participantinc.org, through May 4. (Cotter)

BLAKE RAYNE The abstract paintings in this show, an important one for this impressive New York artist, were made with aerosol spray directed at folded, cut and stitched-together canvas. And the pictures are only part of a larger conceptual package that includes the display of the paintings' shipping containers and has involved closing the gallery for a week. Mr. Rayne's taking apart of art conventions is erudite, visually effective and of a piece: the installation looks like a cross between a paneled library and a spreading bruise. Miguel Abreu Gallery, 36 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, [phone], miguelabreugallery.com, through May 18. (Cotter)

'UNDER PAIN OF DEATH' This uneven show about capital punishment has too many pieces that are only indirectly related to the theme, but it has some thought-provoking works, including ''The Last Supper,'' an Errol Morris-style documentary film by Mats Bigert and Lars Bergstrom, about preparing final meals for condemned prisoners; and an understated, oddly abstracted video by Harun Farocki in which surveillance tapes reveal murderous conditions in a maximum-security prison. Austrian Cultural Form, 11 East 52nd Street, [phone], acfny.org, through May 10. (Johnson)

'YOU & ME, SOMETIMES ...' In this intriguingly textured group show, organized by Sandra Antelo-Suarez, history, politics, pop culture and conceptualism do a dance, and objects glance off one another without quite touching. Cool shows tend to work this way at present, to be about something but not. And any show with Minerva Cuevas, Allan Kaprow, Karin Schneider and Francisco de Goya tends to work well, and it is even better when the show includes work by artists not often seen here: in this case the young Bosnian conceptualist Sejla Kameric; the New Zealand filmmaker Darcy Lange; Mario Garcia Torres of Mexico City; and the Italian-born Claudio Perna (1937-1997). Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, at Stanton Street, Lower East Side, [phone], lehmannmaupin.com, through May 3. (Cotter)

Out of Town

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM : 'COLOR AS FIELD: AMERICAN PAINTING, 1950-1975,' through May 26. An overdue, if far from perfect, reconsideration of Color Field painting reintroduces the joyful pictorial derring-do of an art movement partly done in by the single-minded advocacy of its biggest fan, the great American art critic Clement Greenberg. It is wonderful to see some of the best of this work float free of the Greenbergian claims for greatness and inevitability, propelled by the fantastic soft power of brilliant color, big scale and judicious amounts of pristine raw canvas -- especially as wielded by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Perhaps humorless power-lust prevented Greenberg from seeing that if, as he said, Abstract Expressionism was Baroque, then Color Field might be Rococo: beautiful, sometimes frivolous and even comedic. Eighth Street and F Street, NW, Washington, [phone], americanart.si.edu. (Smith)

Last Chance

ANNA CRAYCROFT: 'THE AGENCY OF THE ORPHAN' In her impressive solo debut Ms. Craycroft systematically explores why so many protagonists of 19th- and 20th-century fiction have been orphans. A wraparound installation displays 295 framed photographic portraits of orphan heroes from literature, movies and animated cartoons, and Victorian-style fountains feature heads of weeping children. Ms. Craycroft's provocative book, combining semiotic and Jungian analysis, explains what it all means. Tracy Williams Ltd., 313 West Fourth Street, West Village, [phone], tracywilliamsltd.com; closes on Friday. (Johnson)

JIM DOW: 'OLD SCHOOL' Jim Dow has taken large color photographs of Southern courthouses, baseball stadiums and the men's clubs of New York City. Here he visits the formative halls of power: lecture theaters, cafeterias, library carrels and dorm rooms at East Coast universities and schools like Phillips Academy, Tufts and Yale Law. Sometimes they look innocuous -- as if they could be anywhere -- but usually they definitely do not. Occasionally they resemble installation pieces by Mark Dion. Janet Borden, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo, [phone], janetbordeninc.com, closes on Saturday. (Smith)

MICHAELA EICHWALD: 'ERGRIFFENES DASEIN: ARTIST WRITER MENTALIST' In her first New York solo this young Cologne artist works small, oscillating between Expressionism, Neo- and neo-Neo-Expressionism, with some punk rawness thrown in for good measure. Lacquer links the paintings to ceramics and enamels, while the sculptures often combine small found objects, sometimes cast in resin. In all cases a spirited, sardonic compactness results. Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 165 East Broadway, at Rutgers Street, Lower East Side, [phone], reenaspaulings.com; closes on Sunday. (Smith)

TONY FEHER A poet-engineer of the everyday, Mr. Feher works with secondhand marbles, plastic bags and straws, bottles and jars of every sort, coat hangers and chair legs, often achieving a startling and ingenious beauty. His scrappy little sculptures are surprisingly at home in this fancy uptown space; perhaps because their formal economy, humor and modesty echoes that of Pace familiars like Saul Steinberg, Joseph Cornell and Alexander Calder. PaceWildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, [phone], pacewildenstein.com; closes on Saturday. (Smith)

THE FRICK COLLECTION: 'PARMIGIANINO'S ''ANTEA'': A BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE' Exhibitions don't come any smaller than ''Parmigianino's 'Antea': A Beautiful Artifice.'' A painting, a wall text, a nugget of a scholarly catalog, and that's it. It's enough. Certain pictures, like certain performers, don't need troops of extras to make a large effect. Solo suits them. 1 East 70th Street, [phone], frick.org; closes on Thursday. . (Cotter)

MCDERMOTT & MCGOUGH: 'BECAUSE OF HIM' The McDermott & McGough Wayback Machine is now parked in the American 1950s. Though predictably campy, the duo's treatment of this destination is impressively suave and emotionally complex. This exhibition at Cheim & Read presents smoothly painted scenes from midcentury Hollywood melodramas and a terrific room whose walls are covered by more than 180 mirrors. Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, Chelsea, [phone], cheimread.com; closes on Saturday. (Johnson)

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'ART OF TIME: EUROPEAN CLOCKS AND WATCHES FROM THE COLLECTION' This enthralling, compact show presents about 90 European timepieces, ranging from pocket watches to grandfather clocks and dating from the 16th through the 18th centuries. There are traditional mantel clocks in wooden, peaked-roofed houses and extravagantly fanciful forms like one from 1579 that has a revolving globe engraved with star charts and figures of the zodiac held up on the wingtips of a flying horse, all beautifully fashioned in silver. [phone], metmuseum.org; closes on Sunday. (Johnson)

MUSEUM OF ARTS & DESIGN: 'PRICKED: EXTREME EMBROIDERY' The second in a series of exhibitions (following last year's ''Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting''), ''Pricked'' makes another case for needlecraft without the ''craft.'' The show places widely known contemporary artists like Laura Owens and Ghada Amer alongside Elaine Reichek and others who have been working with thread and textiles since the '70s. In the best works historical and technical concerns overlap, just as they do in traditional embroidered samplers. 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, [phone], madmuseum.org; closes on Sunday.

(Karen Rosenberg)

'RE-ORIENTATIONS: ISLAMIC ART AND THE WEST IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES' There have been major exhibitions on the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. But relatively few have traced influence the other way, which is what this small, scholarly show, the product of a Hunter College art history seminar, does. Using little-studied objects from the Metropolitan Museum's Islamic collection, it looks at art produced in India, Iran and Iraq in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Western colonial influences were flowing in. Far from being an aesthetically dim era, it was one of fascinating, complex change. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 68th Street at Lexington Avenue, [phone], hunter.cuny.edu; closes on Saturday.. (Cotter)

'THANK YOU FOR COMING: TRIPLE CANDIE: 2001-08' Manhattan's most interesting alternative space -- maybe its only real one -- is closing its doors with a backward look at its own history. The show includes contributions from artists who did projects there, along with remnants of the space's most innovative offerings: a series of ''nonart'' exhibitions ranging from an unauthorized David Hammons retrospective composed of photocopied catalog pages; a permanent collection show made up of art magazine clips; and a posthumous survey of the work of the fictional artist Lester Hayes. Triple Candie's program of puncturing notions of genius, authenticity and value whizzed straight by most of the art establishment, but will surely end up in the history books. Triple Candie, 461 West 126th Street, Hamilton Heights, [phone], triplecandie.org; closes on Sunday. (Cotter)

MARTHA WILSON: 'PHOTO/TEXT WORKS, 1971-74' In 1976 the conceptual artist and performer Martha Wilson opened her TriBeCa loft to the public as Franklin Furnace, a nonprofit documentary center, archive and exhibition space for artists' books and ephemera that housed some of the most intriguing and fleeting work in town. More than 30 years later, Ms. Wilson is having a show of her own 1970s work, which was in sync with early feminist concerns about distorted and self-distorting images of women. But it also explored what it meant to be self-created and constantly self-revised as an artist and as a person. It's her first solo ever, and it's a gem. A pioneer in preserving art turns out to be a pioneer in creating it. Mitchell Algus Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, [phone], mitchellalgus.com; closes on Saturday. (Cotter)