Museum of Modern Art

Dr. Lakra, is a renowned tattoo artist who lives and works in Mexico. Under his pseudonym, loosely translating as Dr. Delinquent, he draws (tattoos) over vintage printed materials and found objects rather than skin, manipulating images of pin-up girls, 1940s Mexican businessmen, Mexican professional masked wrestlers or luchadores, and Japanese sumo wrestlers. Playful, witty, rather sleazy, and often intentionally vulgar, his work challenges social norms by blurring cultural identities and art forms. Included at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) are works presented from a variety of series and a newly-commissioned mural.

Petah Coyne's baroque works, delicately combining tinted, waxed flowers and taxidermy, will rise up from the floor, and hanging sculptures will descend from the ceiling, taking full advantage of the multiple vantage points of MASS MoCA's vast gallery spaces. The exhibition titled Everything That Rises Must Converge (after a short story by Flannery O'Connor) will open at Mass MoCA on Saturday, May 29, with an opening reception from 5-7 PM.

Artist/composer Christian Marclay (b. 1955), known for the distinctive fusion of sound and image in his art, is the subject of a major exhibition this summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Activated by daily musical performances, the show explores Marclay's approach to the world around him with a particular focus on his graphic scores. Approximately fifty renowned instrumentalists and vocalists, some of whom have collaborated regularly with the artist over the course of the past three decades, are scheduled to interpret the scores exhibited, enabling museum audiences to experience Marclay's work brought to life. The exhibition curated by David Kiehl opens on July 1 and remains on view until September 26.

It seems that some visitors to the Marina Abramovic retrospective, which features nude performance artists, have not been well behaved. Vigilant security guards have ejected individuals caught groping the models. But we were surprised to find the exhibition, one of the most provocative in decades, curiously unarousing. Nude bodies? Endurance? Pain? Ho hum.

During the opening gala of Jacob's Pillow on June 19 the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones will receive the festival's Fourth Annual award. Jones won a Tony Award for Spring Awakening and is the director of Fela a musical which is now on Broadway. The Jacob's Pillow award comes with a prize of $25,000.

This summer the Whitney Museum of American Art focuses on the work of the visionary artist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) in an exhibition curated by acclaimed sculptor Robert Gober. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield features more than one hundred watercolors, drawings, and paintings from private and public collections, as well as selections from Burchfield's journals, sketches, scrapbooks, and correspondence.

Tania Bruguera's work in "On The Political Imaginary," an exhibition on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, brings together many powerful statements through the use of both live performance and installation. The first survey of the artist's interdisciplinary work focuses on the relationship among art, politics, and life.

The Neue Galerie in New York organized the first American retrospective of the German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969). The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. While the New York installation was widely viewed as a mess the exhibition had a profound impact. Many critics and publications list the Dix survey as among the best exhibitions of 2010.

The low key, scaled back, modest and manageable Whitney Biennial 2010 curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari has been dubbed the Obama Biennial. He is even on the cover. The Whitney has used this occasion to reflect on its history and critical reception since the series started in 1932. It begs questions about its mandate, the status of American art, and its relationship to a former partner, the Museum of Modern Art.

The London hit Red by John Logan, starring Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko, and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant Ken originated at the tiny Donmar Warehouse. It has been restaged at the Golden Theatre. It is one of the best new plays on Broadway this season.

Peter Gelb,in a brilliant stroke, brings together Dimitri Shostakovich and William Kentridge at the Metropolitan Opera. The Nose had sixteen productions in Russia and then vanished. One critic noted a new musical language based on rhythm and timbre, rather than arias and cantilenas, everyday speech is set in music.

Recently the Museum of Fine Arts acquired three paintings by the African American artist Felrath Hines. For most of his career he worked as a framer and then as one of America's foremost painting restorers. After his death in 1993 he was twice shown at New York's June Kelly Gallery. Works from the estate have been acquired by major art museums.

Filmmaker John Waters will converse with artist Roni Horn. It is but one of the many events planned for the Winter/Spring at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

In the art world equivalent of musical chairs Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art has snatched its new chief curator, Helen Molesworth, from Harvard. Not long ago the ICA lost a young curator, Jen Mergel, to the MFA. What next in these musical chairs with an empty seat at Harvard which has put on indefinite hold its plans for a new modern/ contemporary museum.

The designer of the first laptop computer (1980) Bill Moggridge was named Director of the Smithsonian's New York based Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Design Museum. He is the first designer to be given this administrative post. After a wonderful career designing strategic elements for a rapidly changing technological society, he will be attempting to add depth and breath to a museum that should better reflect our aesthetic as well as functional past, present and future. However, will the skills of the master designer resonate as a museum administrator or Smithsonian bureaucrat?

Yet again Lynda Benglis is experimenting with materials. The artist recently showed a series of new relief sculptures at Cheim & Read in Chelsea. She is the subject of a retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, through January 24. The exhibition is scheduled to tour in the United States.

The Bauhaus 1919-1933 was the most influential school of avant-garde art and design in the 20th Century. It is famous for its faculty, students and its extraordinary cross discipline conversation about thee nature of art in the modern age. MoMA's exhibit is probably the best presentation ever organized about the quality, craft and depth of this visual and cultural dialogue. There is much to learn and see here. It should not be missed.

The Baroness Hilla Rebay and her patron Solomon R. Guggehneim visited the Bauhaus studio of Vasily Kandinsky in 1930. The acquisition of his work was the basis of the Museum of Non Objective Art which opened in 1939 with Rebay as director. In 1952 it was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and 50 years ago it opened its Wright building. This spectacular Kandinsky exhibition celebrates that history.

Jay Milder has long been a powerful and influential artist in the New York art scene. His third show at Lohin-Geduld, showcases his colorful and mystical recent work.

At 75, sitting in a wheelchair paralyzed by an unknown virus several years ago, Michael Graves ruminated on his education and career at his 50th reunion at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. This was a personal journey of the kid from Indianapolis to the architecture professor at Princeton emeritus, Target's object maker, Post Modern's pater and Corot-like painter.

The theatrical lighting designer, Julie Seitel, has curated the exhiition "Illuminati" at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams, Mass. The switched on theme includes the light artists: Brian Jewett, Marjorie Minkin, John Powell and Richard Harrington as well as Seitel's pieces. It is one of the best shows of the Berkshire summer season.

James Ensor was Belgium's greatest modern painter. MoMA treats us to a diverse look at a unique master painter. A rare chance to encounter the works in depth. With its fantasy mix of macabre elements he anticipated Expressioniam and Surrealism. His work continues to be an influence for young figurative/ exprssionst painters.

When Igor Stavinsky's ballet "Le Sacre du Printemps," with choreography by Vaslav Nijinski, premiered in Paris with the Ballets Russes on May 29, 1913 it provoked a riot. A light attendance for James Levine conducting at Tanglewood indicates that after almost a century it is still a hard sell. Judging by a standing ovation and encore it was clear that much of the audience had come to hear violinist Christian Tarzlaff perform Brahms.

Along with architecture, since the 1930's, the Museum of Modern Art has been a showcase for the best designs in furniture, appliance, textile, graphic and functional object design. With the supervision of Edgar Kaufmann Jr, MoMA featured highest levels of contemporary design through competitions, museum shows and traveling exhibitions. However, through the years, controversy has followed choices and selections in terms of critiques of elitism and crass commercialism.

One of the first major buildings constructed after German reunification, the Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum Berlin), was, after winning a competition, designed by prominent and often controversial architect Daniel Libeskind. One of the foremost proponents of Deconstructivist theory, Libeskind illustrates this design approach by the museum's architecture. The museum exhibits are underwhelming and somewhat confusing, but the museum structure is daring and compelling.