Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (78%); ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS AWARDS (70%); PHOTOGRAPHY (63%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (60%); PHOTOGRAPHY SERVICES (60%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (91%); LONDON, ENGLAND (74%); CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (58%) NEW YORK, USA (91%) SOUTH AFRICA (97%); UNITED STATES (91%); ENGLAND (74%); UNITED KINGDOM (74%)
TITLE: Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (Play)>; Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (Play)>
LOAD-DATE: April 11, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: John Kani and Winston Ntshona reprise roles they created more than 30 years ago. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

876 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
April 11, 2008 Friday

The New York Times on the Web

Museum and Gallery Listings
BYLINE: By THE NEW YORK TIMES
SECTION: Section ; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; Pg.
LENGTH: 5666 words
ART

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

Museums

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 OF ART: '$;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. (Ken 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)

THE FRICK COLLECTION: 'PARMIGIANINO'S ''ANTEA'': A BEAUTIFUL ARTIFICE,' through April 27. 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. (Holland Cotter)

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 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'ART OF TIME: EUROPEAN CLOCKS AND WATCHES FROM THE COLLECTION,' through April 27. 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. (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)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: 'MICHELANGELO, VASARI AND THEIR CONTEMPORARIES: DRAWINGS FROM THE UFFIZI,' through April 20. Michelangelo, with a couple of spectacular drawings, is the marquee name here, but many of the 16th-century Florentine artists he influenced fill the space, beginning with the extreme polymath Giorgio Vasari. A handful of drawings by Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino will knock your socks off, as will work by a few less familiar artists, all working to make the Medici rulers of Florence look good. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008590-0310, morganlibrary.org. (Cotter)

MUSEUM OF ARTS & DESIGN: 'PRICKED: EXTREME EMBROIDERY,' through April 27. 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. (Rosenberg)

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 THE CITY OF NEW YORK: 'PICTURING NEW YORK: THE ART OF YVONNE JACQUETTE AND RUDY BURCKHARDT,' through April 13 (Burckhardt); through May 4 (Jacquette). This dual exhibition displays photographs by Burckhardt, who died at 85 in 1999, alongside paintings by Ms. Jacquette, his widow and 20 years his junior, who is still working. Burckhardt's black-and-white images approach the city from several angles, descending from rooftops to street level and even into the subways. Ms. Jacquette's works peer down into the canyons between high-rises. This pair of shows does not establish either artist as an unjustly overlooked talent, but it reveals the competing visions of the city behind a romantic and creative partnership. 1220 Fifth Avenue, at 103rd Street, [phone], mcny.org. (Rosenberg)

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 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 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. [phone], whitney.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Uptown

CARROLL DUNHAM, 'PAINTINGS ON WOOD, 1982-1987' Few careers in painting have been more consistently interesting to follow over the past 25 years than Carroll Dunham's. It all began back in the early 1980s when he discovered plywood. From 1982 to 1987, he painted on laminated pine and later on panels covered with more exotic veneers, creating abstract, funny and strange duets of grainy wood and polymorphous paint. This vibrant exhibition presents a selection of those seminal works. Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79th Street, [phone], skarstedt.com, through April 19. (Johnson)

'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. And relatively few that 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, through April 26. (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

NINA CHANEL ABNEY: 'DIRTY WASH' This promising young painter has race on her caustically inclined mind and a developing style that could be said to negotiate a truce between Robert Colescott and Kara Walker; history painting and political caricature; and the nation's diverse shades of skin. Minstrelsy plays its part. The results include Condoleezza Rice in a bikini, Al Sharpton in a fireman's hat and Barack Obama crossing the Delaware. All are all put forth with a raucously beautiful palette and malevolent details lurking in every corner. Kravets/Wehby Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, [phone], kravetswehbygallery.com, through April 19. (Smith)

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)

LABORATORIO 060 This spare show, part documentary, part participatory, is the work of the Laboratorio 060, a Mexico City artists collective (Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano and Daniela Wolf are the members) that for the most part operates outside of the traditional gallery setting. It creates interventionist projects with street vendors as collaborators; it rethinks the notion of beauty by asking young women to pose in a street vending stall as the Venus de Milo; it brings art to new audiences by turning rush-hour traffic into a performance piece. Cue Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, [phone], cueartfoundation.org, through April 19. (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, [phone], through April 26. (Cotter)

Galleries: Other

'COUP DE GRACE' A new addition to the Lower East Side art scene is the clean, well-lighted space of Simon Preston, formerly of the Project. This inaugural show centers on the merciful death blow that is intended to end suffering. Daniel Joseph Martinez's mechanized sculpture spews fake blood onto the wall and floor from a nozzle hidden in a stuffed rabbit. Mary Kelly imagines a postcard (writ large in a thick layer of lint) from the mother of James Chaney, the murdered civil rights worker. Michelle Lopez adds prosthetic limbs to a tree branch. Touhami Ennadre and General Idea round out the theme of anguished death and the violated body, and no one has any intention of putting us out of our misery. Simon Preston, 301 Broome Street, between Eldridge and Forsyth Streets, Lower East Side, [phone], simonprestongallery.com; through April 23. (Smith)

ALICE O'MALLEY: 'COMMUNITY OF ELSEWHERES' An old-style space in the rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side gives a sense of undergrounds recently past or present 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 -- circa 2001 -- but is fading fast. Participant Inc., 253 East Houston Street, [phone], through May 4. (Cotter)

IAN PEDIGO: 'TITANIUM PRO' Located at the overpopulated intersection of collage and assemblage -- and using a combination of magazine images, found paper, tape and cast-off domestic building materials -- this work avoids many of the current cliches. Everything is used sparely and with a geometric sense of structure; details stand out and include drawing, applications of color and little touches that may or may not be accidental. All is revealed. Thought and physical precision foment a kind of resurrection. Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, 438 Union Avenue, near Devoe Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, [phone], klausgallery.com, through April 20. (Smith)

'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)

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

'THE ENGAGING WORLD OF DORIS LEE (1905-1983)' During the 1940s and '50s the wrongfully forgotten Doris Lee evolved a sophisticated fusion of folk art, illustration and modernist painting that ran the gamut from Grandma Moses to a rather prim Abstract Expressionism. She had just enough of everything -- touch, color sense, humor, love of painting, sophistication -- to make some fey, truly irresistible paintings. D. Wigmore Fine Art, 730 Fifth Avenue, near 57th Street, [phone], dwigmore.com; closes on Monday. (Smith)

'FACES FROM MEDIEVAL JAPAN' Featured in religious rituals and then retired to temples where they continued to ward off evil, these rare 14th-through-17th-century carved wood masks depict demons, monkeys and, in one case, an old man in expressions that range from subtle to grotesque. They are displayed with a large Muromachi-period mandala depicting the Nachi shrine and its famous waterfall that should also not be missed. Koichi Yanagi Fine Arts, 17 East 71 Street, [phone]; closes on Tuesday. (Smith)

'HERE COMES THE SUN: LORI ELLISON AND SHARI MENDELSON' A certain visionary fervor infuses these two artists. Repeating units are favored to excellent effect, whether the transparent circles of plastic joined into sparkling screens and nebulae in Ms. Mendelson's work, or the fine fields of geometric or organic patterns in Ms. Ellison's paintings and drawings. Ms. Ellison deftly summons a mesmerizing power that compares quite favorably to that of Agnes Martin, James Siena and aboriginal or tantric art; it suggests that she may be some kind of genius. Sideshow, 319 Bedford Avenue, near South Second Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, [phone], sideshowgallery.com; closes on Sunday . (Smith)

MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: 'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: IRVING PENN PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS' Last spring, in its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired 67 of Irving Penn's portraits of artists, writers and musicians. (Thirty-five were donated by Mr. Penn.) The entire group is temporarily on view in an exhibition that complements the library's collection of 20th-century drawings, manuscripts, books and musical scores. Organized by a guest curator, Peter Barberie, ''Close Encounters'' encompasses work from the 1940s, when Mr. Penn first started to work for Vogue, through portraits published in The New Yorker in 2006. Mr. Penn's subjects, including Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, emerged from their portrait sessions with their carefully shaped personas profoundly shaken. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, [phone], themorgan.org; closes on Sunday. (Rosenberg)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'JAN DE COCK: DENKMAL 11, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, 11 WEST 53 STREET, NEW YORK, 2008' The word denkmal translates from German as monument or memorial. In Dutch it is a mold for thought. Both definitions fit the work of Jan De Cock, a 31-year-old Belgian artist who appropriates and arranges photographs in what might be viewed as an open-ended yet ultimately conservative encyclopedia. Overflowing with references to modern art, experimental film, photography and architecture, the project pulls most of the museum into its orbit. It incorporates elements of De Stijl, Russian Constructivism and Kurt Schwitters's collage/studio Merzbau, among other things. It is also the starting point of a yearlong project called ''American Odyssey,'' for which Mr. De Cock will travel to various and document cultural landmarks around the country. [phone], moma.org; closes on Monday. (Rosenberg)

JEAN ROYeRE Organized by two Parisian galleries, Patrick Seguin and Jacques Lacoste, this exhibition provides New Yorkers with a rare in-depth look at the work of Jean Royere (1902-1981). It includes 100 objects presented in plausible if free-flowing domestic arrangements designed by India Mahdavi and demonstrates the timeless appeal of this French master's fusion of Art Deco streamlining with the organic forms of the 1950s. Royere excelled at lighting design, and when it came to seating, he made round, low and even squat look great. Some of his chairs suggest a time and place when people tended to be shorter and thinner than in the here and now. Sonnabend Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, [phone]; closes on Saturday. (Smith)

SCANDINAVIA HOUSE: 'ARS FENNICA: FINNISH ART NOW' Finland has its own version of the Turner Prize in Britain: the $50,000 Ars Fennica Prize. This sleepy show presents works by 2007's four finalists. It includes gimmicky sculptures by Markus Kahre; fairy-tale-like images painted and drawn by Elina Merenmies; Anna Tuori's brushy, mock-kitsch paintings of vaguely Asian landscapes; and, by Elina Brotherus, large, bland landscape photographs and a relaxing video triptych of people skinny dipping in peaceful, outdoor waters. 58 Park Avenue between 37th and 38th streets, [phone], scandinaviahouse.org; closes on Saturday. (Johnson)