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"The Season's Best Museum Shows\nFrom Cindy Sherman's shape-shifting self-portraits at New York's MoMA to Gauguin's Polynesian paintings at the Seattle Art Museum, AD picks a dozen exhibitions not to miss this spring\n\"John Chamberlain: Choices\"\n\n Guggenheim Museum,\n\n New York\n\n This much-anticipated survey of John Chamberlain's work, the first in a U.S. museum since 1986, unexpectedly became a memorial show when the giant of postwar American art died in December, at 84. Nearly 100 pieces will be on view, including dozens of his signature crumpled-metal sculptures made using salvaged automobile fenders, hoods, and roofs, as well as examples of his diversions into painting, photography, and sculpting with foam, resin, and foil. Blending an Abstract Expressionist bravado, a Minimalist affinity for industrially fabricated materials, and Pop references to this country's beloved car culture, Chamberlain's work is about as quintessentially American as it gets.\n\n February 24\u2013May 13; guggenheim.org\n\n Lord Suckfist, 1989, by John Chamberlain.\n\"Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise\"\n\n Seattle Art Museum\n\n Fleeing what he saw as an overly conventional Europe, the Postimpressionist maverick Paul Gauguin set sail for Polynesia in 1891, lured by its exotic remoteness, his own idealized notions of the South Pacific's indigenous peoples, and, as he put it, \"the silence of the beautiful tropical nights.\" Gauguin lived out most of his final 12 years in Tahiti and the Marquesas, spending those tropical nights in the company of young native women and his days creating some of his best-known artworks. This traveling exhibition, which makes its only U.S. stop in Seattle, pairs approximately 60 of Gauguin's paintings, drawings, and sculptures with important Polynesian carved figures and objects, highlighting the artist's complex relationship with the local cultures.\n\n February 9\u2013April 29; seattleartmuseum.org\n\n From left: Arearea no Varua ino (Words of the Devil, or Reclining Tahitian Women), 1894, by Paul Gauguin. Moai Kavakava (Cadaverous Male Figure), late 18th century to mid-19th century, Easter Island.\n\"Cindy Sherman\"\n\n The Museum of Modern Art, New York\n\n Bringing together more than 180 photographs, this retrospective surveys Cindy Sherman's nearly four-decade career, during which the master shape-shifter has photographed herself in an ever-changing parade of assumed identities. The exhibition begins with her breakthrough \"Untitled Film Stills\" (1977\u201380), a group of 69 black-and-white images that portray the artist in fictional scenes evocative of classic Hollywood movies. All of her subsequent series are represented\u2014from the '80s history portraits that show her posed as figures out of Old Master paintings, to the '90s pornography-skewering images of her wearing grotesque prosthetics, to the recent pictures of the artist made up as aging New York society matrons. Always clever, her work is often politically poignant, critiquing female stereotypes and obsessions with fashion, youth, and status.\n\n February 26\u2013June 11; moma.org\n\n Clockwise from left: Cindy Sherman's Untitled #465 (2008), Untitled #119 (1983), and Untitled Film Still #21 (1978).\n\"Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection\"\n\n Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama\n\n One of the oddest and most extraordinary forms of jewelry to emerge in the late 18th century was the eye miniature. A relatively little-studied subject, these hand-painted keepsakes\u2014brooches, rings, lockets\u2014featuring a depiction of a single human eye (usually a lover's) were given as tokens of affection or remembrance. A fad for exchanging eye portraits was said to have started in 1785, when the Prince of Wales gave one to Maria Fitzherbert as a secret marriage proposal. As it happens, the world's largest collection belongs to Dr. and Mrs. David A. Skier of Birmingham, who are lending 98 of the 101 pieces they own for this unprecedented exhibition.\n\n February 7\u2013June 10; artsbma.org\n\n Brown left-eye miniature on a rose-gold octagonal pendant surrounded by blue enamel and half pearls, circa 1830.\n\"Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski\"\n\n \"Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics: The Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio Collection\"\n\n The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston\n\n This season the MFA opens a pair of must-see exhibitions whose stories begin in the 1960s. First up is a retrospective of the work of Jules Olitski, the celebrated Color Field painter whose '60s canvases feature expanses of flat, luminous color applied\u2014sometimes stained or sprayed\u2014with no visible brushstrokes. The show traces his career through a variety of abstract modes, culminating with the vibrant visionary paintings he completed in the years before his death in 2007. Opening a few weeks later is an exhibition featuring more than 150 examples of modern and contemporary ceramics assembled since the '60s by collector-dealers Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio. In 2007 the museum acquired their pioneering collection, which ranges from influential postwar studio potters they have championed, such as Peter Voulkos and Beatrice Wood, to younger ceramic artists, like Barnaby Barford and Aoki Katsuyo, who are pushing the medium in innovative directions.\n\n *\"Revelation,\" February 12\u2013May 6\n\n \"Shifting Paradigms,\" March 4\u2013June 3; mfah.org*\n\n From left: Prince Patutszky Pleasures, 1962, by Jules Olitski. Predictive Dream, 2005, by Aoki Katsuyo.\n\"Alighiero Boetti\"\n\n Tate Modern, London\n\n Both scholarly and market interest in Arte Povera\u2014the late-1960s-and-early-'70s movement led by a group of Italian artists who utilized humble materials and sought to break down barriers between art and everyday life\u2014continue to explode. One of its central figures, Alighiero Boetti, is the subject of this full-dress retrospective, which transfers to New York's Museum of Modern Art this summer, after its stop at the Tate. Included are Boetti's early sculptural pieces made using wood, cardboard, and aluminum, as well as his experiments with mail art and his famous Mappa. These strikingly embroidered world maps, in which each country features the design of its national flag, were community efforts, produced by Afghani weavers Boetti hired as part of a long-term art project in Kabul\u2014a project that abruptly ended with the 1979 Soviet invasion.\n\n February 28\u2013May 27; tate.org.uk\n\n Mappa, 1971\u201372, by Alighiero Boetti.\n\"Dreams of Nature. Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky\"\n\n Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam\n\n In the final two decades of the 19th century, artists across Europe were exploring dream worlds, mystical truths, and notions of the sublime in their work. The movement, known as Symbolism, looked to ancient myths as well as prophecies of the future; it embraced both utopian and dystopian visions. This show, the first dedicated to the Symbolist landscape in Europe, examines how artists such as the Scandinavian painters Akseli Gallen-Kallela (the subject of a solo exhibition at the Mus\u00E9e d'Orsay in Paris, February 7\u2013May 6) and Harald Sohlberg believed that art should express feelings rather than objectively depict the natural world. The exhibition looks specifically at how other artists, including Van Gogh, conveyed ideas about seasonal cycles and cosmic forces in their work, while artists like Edvard Munch sought to reflect the unconscious mind.\n\n February 24\u2013June 17; vangoghmuseum.nl\n\n Lake Keitele, 1905, by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.\n\"Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space\"\n\n Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.\n\n This show, which previously appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, presents five large-scale installations by major Latin American artists\u2014Carlos Cruz-Diez, Lucio Fontana, H\u00E9lio Oiticica, Jes\u00FAs Rafael Soto, and Julio Le Parc\u2014all of whom have been the focus of increasing art-world interest lately. The thesis behind this interactive unabashed crowd-pleaser is that these artists were making works dealing with perceptions of light, color, and space well before Southern California's celebrated Light and Space movement began to take root in the mid-'60s. Perhaps the most dramatic piece is Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation, which was originally created in 1965 and features a series of spaces illuminated in different colors, producing trippy optical effects as you pass through. Alas, the Oiticica swimming-pool piece included at MOCA is being replaced, so leave your trunks at home. The artist is instead represented by a light-and-music-filled room (conceived in 1973) that offers mattresses for lounging and emery boards\u2014just in case you need to touch up your manicure.\n\n February 23\u2013May 13; hirshhorn.si.edu\n\n From left: Jes\u00FAs Rafael Soto's Blue Penetrable BBL, 1969, fabricated 1999. Carlos Cruz-Diez's Chromosaturation, 1965, refabricated 2010.\n\"Isaac Julien: Ten Thousand Waves\"\n\n Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, downtown location\n\n This is the first West Coast showing of Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves, the British artist's widely praised 450-minute film installation that premiered at the 2010 Sydney Biennial. Displayed on nine double-sided screens, the work interweaves three different stories, including the 2004 tragedy that saw 23 illegal Chinese immigrants, who had been smuggled into Britain, drowned during a storm while working as cockle harvesters. The other two stories involve the Chinese legend of the sea goddess Mazu (played by actress Maggie Cheung), said to protect fishermen and sailors from harm, and the 1934 Chinese silent film The Goddess, which portrays the tragic life of a Shanghai woman who turns to prostitution to support herself and her son. Together the three strands become an evocative meditation on China's past and present and its transition toward modernity and affluence.\n\n February 25\u2013December 1; mcasd.org\n\n Isaac Julien's Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010.\nNew York Contemporary Art Surveys\n\n \"The Generational Triennial,\" New Museum of Contemporary Art\n\n \"Whitney Biennial,\" Whitney Museum of American Art\n\n These days, any contemporary art museum with a bit of ambition has a regular prize-giving or survey show, with the goal of presenting some institutional perspective on the most worthy art being made right now. The New Museum got into the game after moving into its high-profile quarters on New York's Lower East Side, launching a triennial survey, in part to distinguish itself from the long-running Whitney Biennial uptown. As is destined to happen every six years, the two exhibitions will overlap this year\u2014if not exactly go head-to-head. The New Museum's triennial is international in scope and deliberately skews young. This version, subtitled \"The Ungovernables\"\u2014with implications of anarchy and resistance\u2014showcases roughly 35 artists, all born since the mid-'70s. The Whitney, in contrast, focuses on artists working in this country and sets no age parameters, featuring 51 \"emerging and established\" artists. Don't look for too many common threads in either show, both of which will include film, video, and multidisciplinary performances in addition to paintings, sculpture, and photography. These are shows critics love to hate. But for those who care about the art of today, they're must-sees.\n\n \"The Generational Triennial,\" February 15\u2013April 22; newmuseum.org\n\n \"Whitney Biennial,\" March 1\u2013May 27; whitney.org\n\n From left: Still from Turning (live mix) with Antony and the Johnsons, 2004, by Charles Atlas. Now I Will Be with My Son, the Murderer of Your Heritage, Adri\u00E1n Villar Rojas's 2011 installation for the Argentine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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