The Stranger

A Balancing Act: Alexander Calder: A happy modernist is a funny thing. But here he is, and this 40-work survey of his career—taken from the collection of Jon and Mary Shirley— includes mobiles, monumental sculptures, jewelry, works on paper, and miniature maquettes. There are a few standouts in this whirlwind tour.

Heide Hinrichs's new installation Borrowed Tails, "is a collection of drawings and sculptures made from ordinary materials: lined paper, dead soccer and tennis balls, strings, cardboard boxes, a table, and a bicycle tube. Together, the ordinary objects suggest a spare or bare geography of trees, flowers, rocks, and an ocean. From the ordinary objects we get a sense of what the historian Clive Gamble calls 'deep time,' objects that are from a time that's so remote that they have about them an impenetrable and unsettling otherness." (Charles Mudede)

Curator Michael Darling discusses Alexander Calder's work in A Balancing Act.

Freeing the Figure: looking at Jacob Lawrence's work formally, outside of political and historical importance, by showing him with artists like Max Beckmann, Jose Clemente Orozco, Kathe Köllwitz, and more.

Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings from the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti: Michelangelo didn't want anyone to see his drawings; he burned as many as he could. Here are 12 that escaped the flames. There's also a hodgepodge of additional material—random works inspired by Michelangelo, a David replica, etc etc—which gives the show the feeling of a roadside attraction.

Permanent collections in African, Asian, Native American, early American, European, modernism, decorative arts, and contemporary.

Five videos by the Belgian artist Nicolas Provost range in length from one minute to 15. He uses the universal language of filmmaking—the way you know what it looks like just before a kiss happens, the way you know the sound of suspense, the way you sense when a zoom is coming—and both shoots his own footage as well as uses footage from famous films. Bataille is a series of mirrored scenes from Kurosawa's Rashomon, which become monstrous in the doubling. Gravity is a tapestry of alternating kisses from movies that eventually start strobing and then disappear. It's seductive then disorienting. "My work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience," Provost has written. "That said, it's all about love." The longest of the videos is also the most involving: Plot Point, shot using a hidden camera on New York City streets, culminates in the mass, silent exodus of a seemingly endless line of twinkling and blinking police cars on their way to some unidentified emergency. Nothing actually happens over the 15 minutes, but it's entirely dramatic, because of the tensed-up music (by Moby) and the pans and zooms and cuts. This artifice has become our second nature.