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Museum & Gallery Listings for Aug. 26-Sept. 1

From left, two gowns by Christian Dior from 1949-50 and an evening dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen from 2012. The garments are part of the Costume Institute exhibition “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” which will close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sept. 5. See listing below.Credit...Jake Naughton for The New York Times

A critical guide to exhibitions and installations in the New York area.

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM: ‘FEVER WITHIN: THE ART OF RONALD LOCKETT’ (through Sept. 18) A self-taught artist who lived in Bessemer, Ala., Ronald Lockett (1965-98) created an impressive oeuvre of emotionally raw and politically trenchant paintings and sculptures in a career cut short by his death from AIDS-related pneumonia at 32. Using paint and all kinds of found materials, including sheet metal, chain-link fencing, tree branches and industrial wooden pallets, he created works that meditate on racism, war and threats to the natural environment. This exhibition presents 49 of the approximately 400 pieces that Mr. Lockett produced in his lifetime. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street, 212-595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)

BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS: ‘ART AIDS AMERICA’ (through Oct. 23) We’ve had a very long wait for a mainstream museum in the United States to organize a major survey of work produced in response to the AIDS pandemic, past and continuing. “Art AIDS America” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts isn’t exactly the show we’ve been looking for: It lacks focus, relies too heavily on canonical names and includes far too few African-American artists. But it’s well worth a visit for dynamic individual works, and as a reminder of what art can do: broadcast or insinuate messages into the larger culture, embody complex truths, absorb fear, preserve memory. 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, the Bronx, 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: ‘DISGUISE: MASKS AND GLOBAL AFRICAN ART’ (through Sept. 18) African masks had an enormous influence on the development of Modern art as luminaries like Picasso and Giacometti appropriated and interpreted their startling forms and materials. But what about modern artists of African descent? This entertaining show features pieces by 25 African artists and artists of African descent, all of whose works relate in some way to masks and masquerades while involving neon lights, video projections, found objects, photography and other devices of the global avant-garde. Distributed among those new works is an excellent selection of traditional African masks, costumes and sculptures. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ BROOKLYN MUSEUM REINSTALLATION (continuing) Brooklyn Museum’s new director, Anne Pasternak, has wasted no time in putting her mark on the presentation of the institution’s permanent collection. Under her auspices, an important section of the Egyptian galleries has been visually streamlined and the European paintings collection organized by theme. More important, the American collection has been made emphatically Pan-American, and true histories, many of them not beautiful, have begun to be told. This museum has always had the potential to be New York City’s great alternative encyclopedic space, the un-Met. Maybe it is now on its way to achieving that goal. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Cotter)

COOPER HEWITT, SMITHSONIAN DESIGN MUSEUM: ‘THOM BROWNE SELECTS’ (through Oct. 23) This featherweight exhibition is not a showcase of the American fashion designer Thom Browne’s clothing. Instead, four dozen pairs of nickel-dunked shoes sit amid 50 mirrors and frames from the 18th to 20th centuries — which you will not be able to study or even see, thanks to a barrier of the sort blocking entry to museum period rooms. It’s not a crime every once in a while to subordinate works of art into an outsider’s totalizing vision, but you’d wish the museum’s collection had a more honorable role to play than props for such a frivolous hall of mirrors. 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan, 212-849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Jason Farago)

FRICK COLLECTION: ‘WATTEAU’S SOLDIERS: SCENES OF MILITARY LIFE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE’ (through Oct. 2) Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) has been beloved for his bucolic scenes of Rococo frivolity known as fetes galantes. Not so famous are paintings focused on the lives of common soldiers in a time of war that he made between 1709 and 1715. While the military subject matter differs markedly from that of Watteau’s fetes galantes, there’s an allusive, bittersweet poetry about these early works that looks forward to the later visions of pastoral dalliance. Of the seven such works known to have survived, four are featured along with 13 related drawings in this illuminating show. 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, 212-288-0700, frick.org. (Johnson)

★ GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: ‘MOHOLY-NAGY: FUTURE PRESENT’ (through Sept. 7) This first exhibition in this country in over 50 years of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy — the great Hungarian visionary of multiple media — may also be the largest anywhere. Its 300 works in painting, film, sculpture and several species of design and photography are so ingeniously displayed, you’d think Frank Lloyd Wright’s great spiral was built to hold it. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Roberta Smith)

★ INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ‘PUBLIC, PRIVATE, SECRET’ (through January 2017) The International Center of Photography is back, and welcome. Two years after losing its Midtown quarters, the center has reopened on the Bowery, across from the New Museum. The duplex galleries are larger than the old ones, though they feel boxy and closed-in, at least for this inaugural offering. As if to offset the impression, the show gives evidence that the center’s embrace of photography itself has fully extended to digital media. The shift in emphasis will make old-style connoisseurs crazy, but it is in line with the center’s history as a showcase for street photography, war photography and other socially committed genres, the differences being that the internet is now the boulevard and the battlefield, and everyone is a photographer, and everything is on view, instantly and all the time. International Center of Photography, 250 Bowery, between East Houston and Prince Streets, 212-857-0000, icp.org. (Cotter)

★ JEWISH MUSEUM: ‘ROBERTO BURLE MARX: BRAZILIAN MODERNIST’ (through Sept. 18) Working primarily in South America, Roberto Burle Marx, the great Brazilian landscape architect, designed some of the modern world’s most distinctive parks and gardens, from an immense, jazzy tattoo of a promenade on the beachfront of Rio de Janeiro to rooftop plantings in Brasília, a city carved from jungle. In the process, he became invested, heart and mind, in preserving the Amazonian paradise that surrounded him, fought to halt its devastation and turned his home near Rio into a sanctuary for one of the largest collections of tropical plants anywhere. To appreciate his art fully, you have to go to the gardens themselves, but a visit to the compact Jewish Museum show gives you a full sense of his protean work as designer, painter, sculptor and collector. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Cotter)

LESLIE-LOHMAN MUSEUM OF GAY AND LESBIAN ART: ‘A DEEPER DIVE’ (through Sept. 25) A supplement to “Art AIDS America” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, this smaller show gives an expanded look at eight of its artists and, through them, suggests various strategies by which H.I.V. and AIDS as subjects have been introduced into art without being overtly stated. Some of the participants are firmly on the art-world radar; others not. The show is particularly valuable for revisiting the work of Ann P. Meredith who, early on, traveled the United States documenting the lives of women living with H.I.V. and AIDS. 26 Wooster Street, near Grand Street, SoHo, 212-431-2609, leslielohman.org. (Cotter)

★ MET BREUER: ‘DIANE ARBUS: IN THE BEGINNING’ (through Nov. 27) This show of 100 or so early photographs by Arbus (1923-71), many on view for the first time, has a terrific installation, with work hung on columnlike panels that suggest rows of doors receding into darkness. The pictures themselves, dating between 1956 and 1962, have a grainy, moody texture, and they reveal an Arbus who had already landed on some of her favored themes: childhood, negotiable gender, fringe culture and class. If the show as a whole is more powerful than most of its individual images, there are some wonderful things. And as a forecast of mature work to come — familiar examples are included in a separate gallery — it is utterly magnetic. 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, Manhattan, 212-535-0177, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ MET BREUER: ‘UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE’ (through Sept. 4) The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Breuer has inaugurated its tenancy in the former home of the Whitney Museum with an unusually poetic blockbuster. Encompassing fully astounding loans (Titian, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Leonardo) and little-seen gems of its own (just one word: Bruegel), it meditates across five centuries and some 190 objects on the nature, meaning and value of artworks left unfinished by accident or design. It is best in its early sections or when it mixes things up, but it illuminates the process of both making and looking at art in remarkable ways. 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, 212-731-1675, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: ‘CELEBRATING THE ARTS OF JAPAN: THE MARY GRIGGS BURKE COLLECTION’ (through May 2017) This lavish collection of 160 objects came to the Met from the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation in early 2015. The Burkes loved Japanese art — all of it — and the exhibition is close to compendious in terms of media, from wood-carved Buddhas to bamboo baskets, with a particular strength in painting, early and late. The quality of the work? Japan thinks highly enough of it to have made the Burke holdings the first Japanese collection from abroad ever to show at Tokyo National Museum. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: ‘DIVINE PLEASURES: PAINTING FROM INDIA’S RAJPUT COURTS — THE KRONOS COLLECTIONS’ (through Sept. 12) Compared with the exacting refinement of Muslim artists in Mughal-era India, Hindu painters — the subject of this ravishing exhibition, which celebrates a gift to the Met — favored bold color and boisterous figuration. Half of the art here comes from Rajasthan, in the northwest of the subcontinent, where artists at the courts of Hindu principalities created loose-leaf albums depicting pining lovers alone in the forest, musical instruments at their sides. (These ragamala, or “garlands of ragas,” were an early experiment in multimedia: Each painting was associated with a musical mode, which was in turn associated with a poetic source.) The other half comes from the Punjab hills, south of the Himalayas, where erotic paintings had a divine tinge. One ardent, exquisite painting from the late 18th century shows Krishna and his companion Lakshmi making love in a dense copse of flowering trees, her bare breasts pressed against his blue torso. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Farago)

★ MOMA PS1: ‘VITO ACCONCI: WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976’ (through Sept. 18) Vito Acconci, who bushwhacked the path to video art in New York in the 1960s and early ’70s, makes a lot of young artists showing now look tame. The dozens of short or shortish videos in this excellent early-career survey manage to be unnervingly funny, pathetically gross and politically razor sharp. And even with a patina of age, they’re still too funky to fit into the Museum of Modern Art’s scrubbed white Manhattan premises. Included is his monumental video trilogy “The Red Tapes,” in which he plays a Melvillian poet-prophet, leading revolutions, forecasting disaster and shuffling American history with a cardsharp’s hand. MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084, ps1.org. (Cotter)

★ MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: ‘REMBRANDT’S FIRST MASTERPIECE’ (through Sept. 18) In 1629, after some years of apprenticeship, the young Rembrandt finished what many experts consider his first painting in his resolved and distinctive style. Titled “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” it was certainly powerful in ways that his great work would be, with its operatic, Verdian largeness of gesture, its sense for light as both specific and cosmic, and its piercing, unembarrassable instinct for human emotion. Now in a British private collection, the picture is visiting New York for the first time, and has been surrounded at the Morgan Library with a wealth of the artist’s prints and drawings. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, 212-685-0008, themorgan.org. (Cotter)

★ EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO: ‘ANTONIO LOPEZ: FUTURE FUNK FASHION’ (through Nov. 26) Antonio Lopez was born in Puerto Rico in 1943 and moved with his family to East Harlem when he was 7, attending grade school two blocks from where El Museo del Barrio is now. His skill as a draftsman was spotted early. In his second year at the Fashion Institute of Technology, he was hired as an illustrator by Women’s Wear Daily, by which time he’d met the artist Juan Ramos, also Puerto Rican, who became his lover and creative partner. Their work was steeped in the eroticized atmosphere of gay urban life in New York in the late 1960s and ’70s, and they were among the first in the fashion industry to make regular use of black and Latino models. This survey of drawings and photographs, most of it from a private collection, is like an archive thrown open, a document both of an era and of an artistic collaboration cut short by AIDS. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org. (Cotter)

★ MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ‘BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE’ (through Oct. 2) One of the great outliers of postwar American art is the subject of a profuse, beautifully ordered retrospective. Each gallery highlights one aspect of his interdisciplinary sensibility: the early paintings, sardonic assemblages, exquisite collages, magnificent films and miraculous inkblot drawings. Throughout, a dark view of American life and power is offset by a passion for melding small bits and pieces of reality into unlikely, often ecstatic wholes. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ‘DADAGLOBE RECONSTRUCTED’ (through Sept. 18) In 1920, the Romanian poet and gadfly Tristan Tzara made plans for a worldwide publication featuring the art of Dada, the convention-busting movement that arose from the senselessness of World War I. The anthology never materialized, but this sparky show, first seen at the Kunsthaus Zürich and accompanied by a landmark catalog, reassembles the drawings, reproductions and wacky head shots that Dadaists like Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp contributed to it. (There’s also fascinating correspondence and ephemera, plus photographs of knees-up parties; at one, Tzara appears in black tie with the word Dada scrawled across his forehead.) For the Dadaists, art wasn’t a matter of placing discrete objects in museums, but circulating ideas and images across new, international media networks. It is an aim as fresh today as it was a century ago. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Farago)

★ MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ‘FROM THE COLLECTION: 1960-1969’ (through March 2017) MoMA shakes up its sanctum sanctorum, installing half of its permanent collection galleries with works chosen by 17 curators from a single decade: the tumultuous 1960s. The limited time frame is balanced by unprecedented breadth and variety. As never before, the presentation mixes together objects and artworks from all six of the museum’s curatorial departments. The blend is alternately stimulating and bewildering, revelatory and infuriating: yet another symptom of the museum’s limited curatorial mind-set. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ‘NAN GOLDIN: THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY’ (through February 2017) Thirty-three years ago, Nan Goldin began taking the photographs that would make up the first iterations of her astounding, autobiographical slide show, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Named after a song from “The Threepenny Opera,” it eventually came to consist of about 700 images of friends, lovers and herself disporting themselves with shameless abandon in the bohemian squalor of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Set to a rousing, eclectic selection of music, including opera, pop, rock and blues, and projected over about 45 minutes, it was in its time and still is an emotionally wrenching revelation, a defining achievement of art in the 1980s. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: ‘TONY OURSLER: IMPONDERABLE’ (through January 2017) This small exhibition is centered on a 90-minute film in which episodes from the history of spiritualist frauds and hoaxes are re-enacted by people in fanciful costumes while mystic flames, smoke and ectoplasmic phenomena come and go. At certain moments during “Imponderable,” you feel breezes wafting over you and hear loud thumping under the theater’s risers. The crudeness of these effects is part of the generally comical spirit. It’s all about the confusion between illusion and reality to which human beings seem to be congenitally susceptible. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK: ‘ACTIVIST NEW YORK’ (continuing) With a focus on activist tactics from the 17th century to the present, this exhibition — designed by the firm Pentagram — is a room-size onslaught of sensory stimulation, complete with videos, graphics and text. Told through 14 “moments” in New York activism, it includes a facsimile of the Flushing Remonstrance (1657), a petition for religious tolerance given to Peter Stuyvesant, director general of the settlement, as well as contemporaneous objects, like a Dutch tobacco box, a Bible and “Meet the Activists” kiosks adjacent to each display, which identify activist groups working in the present. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, 212-534-1672, mcny.org. (Martha Schwendener)

★ NEW MUSEUM: ‘THE KEEPER’ (through Sept. 25) You call it collecting. I call it hoarding. The New Museum calls it art, and this captivating exhibition is entirely devoted to it, filling three floors and a lobby gallery with hundreds of thousands of mostly small objects and images gathered, sorted, arranged and documented by some 30 retentive artists — the keepers — over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. Some of these things are custom-made, others found. Generally speaking, the line between controlled selection and untrammeled accretion is tenuous, as is any clear distinction between connoisseurship and pathology. The show’s real, if unspoken, subjects are the human drive to have more and more, and why. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Cotter)

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM: ‘ALMA THOMAS’ (through Oct. 30) Alma Thomas (1891-1978) had one of the great, late-blooming careers in American art. It was only after retiring from teaching middle school at 69 that she was able to devote herself full time to painting. In the ensuing 18 years she produced the body of work for which she would be justly celebrated, a stream of vividly colorful paintings made of loosely applied patches configured in irregular grids and concentric circles. Twenty paintings on canvas and about three dozen works on paper in this undersized show give a taste of the full-scale museum retrospective she deserves. 144 West 125th Street, Harlem, 212-864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Johnson)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: ‘DANNY LYON: MESSAGE TO THE FUTURE’ (through Sept. 25) This engrossing exhibition presents about 175 pictures by a photographer who became famous in the 1960s and early ’70s for images of civil rights strife in the American South; a Chicago motorcycle gang; and prisoners in the Texas penal system. Equally compelling are three films, the most riveting of which is “Willie” (1985), an 82-minute documentary in color and black-and-white about a hapless prison recidivist named Willie Jaramillo. 99 Gansevoort Street, at Washington Street, 212-570-3600, whitney.org. (Johnson)

★ WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: ‘HUMAN INTEREST: PORTRAITS FROM THE WHITNEY’S COLLECTION’ (through February 2017) A year ago, the Whitney inaugurated its new downtown home with a permanent collection showcase called “America Is Hard to See.” Its even more immediately engaging successor, devoted entirely to portraiture, is now on view and might well have been subtitled “Americans Are Strange to Look At,” which, in the 250 images here, we sure are: funny-strange, beautiful-strange, crazy-strange, dangerous-strange, inscrutable-strange. The work is arranged by theme and spread over two floors. There are magnetic images everywhere. 99 Gansevoort Street, 212-570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: ‘SOPHIA AL-MARIA: BLACK FRIDAY’ (through Oct. 31) A decade or so ago, the Qatari-American artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria came up with a pithy term, Gulf Futurism, to describe the warp-speed transformations of Dubai and other oil-rich cities: the rise of hotels, malls and museums and the incorporation of the area’s Bedouin tribes into an international consumer class. An even more concise manifesto of an installation is now at the Whitney, in “Black Friday,” Ms. Al-Maria’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Comprising a short, suspenseful video (also titled “Black Friday”) set atop a sculptural scattering of small, flickering screens on a pile of sand, this exhibition turns the famously opulent malls of Doha, Qatar’s capital, into a kind of horror set. It’s instantly compelling, but offers just a taste of Ms. Al-Maria’s talents and range. 99 Gansevoort Street, at Washington Street, 212-570-3600, whitney.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

★ WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: ‘STUART DAVIS: IN FULL SWING’ (through Sept. 25) This restless, zestful Whitney exhibition leaves out the earliest phase of a great American modernist’s career but is still broad enough to be a survey while feeling sufficiently focused to qualify as a thematic study. As you move through the show, you move through time, and change over time is the thread the show follows. Beginning in the 1950s, you see Mr. Davis’s dense compositions, abstract with a realist core, start to untangle. His palette simplifies. His use of words, or script-like arabesques, grows. And more and more he looks to the past and brings it forward, revisiting, reusing and transforming motifs from his own art, a pattern he likened to a jazz musician’s improvisations on favorite, unforgettable tunes. 99 Gansevoort Street, at Washington Street, 212-570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)

★ ‘PERSONS OF INTEREST’ (through Sept. 18) Organized by the artist Sam Gordon at an independent bookstore and gallery housed on the premises of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, this group exhibition is drawn from the archives of Visual AIDS, an organization that preserves, supports and promotes the work of H.I.V.-positive artists. As its title suggests, the show is very much about faces and personalities, and the range, past, present and emerging, is a thrill. BGSQD @ the Center, 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, 646-457-0859, bgsqd.com. (Cotter)

★ RICHARD SERRA (through Oct. 22) New works occupying one of Gagosian Gallery’s Chelsea display spaces reveal Mr. Serra to be, at 76, still wrangling sculptural fundamentals into objects and installations of thrilling severity. The space, on West 24th Street, hosts three works made of solid steel slabs as well as a drawing installation. Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, 212-741-1111, gagosian.com. (Johnson)

DIA:BEACON: ROBERT IRWIN: ‘EXCURSUS: HOMAGE TO THE SQUARE³’ (through May 2017) A walk-in maze with walls of white scrim lit by color-filtered fluorescent tubes, Mr. Irwin’s “Excursus: Homage to the Square³” had its debut in 1998 at the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea. It was so popular that the curators elected to keep it on view a year longer than its originally planned run. Its reincarnation here is similarly transporting, if not as thoroughly as the original was. But to experience it at Dia:Beacon alongside Minimalist works by other artists that encourage heightened perceptual attention to the here and now is as spiritually calming as it is historically illuminating. 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, 845-440-0100, diaart.org. (Johnson)

HESSEL MUSEUM OF ART, BARD COLLEGE: ‘TONY OURSLER: THE IMPONDERABLE ARCHIVE’ (through Oct. 30) This fascinating and amusing exhibition consists mainly of 680 items from a collection of more than 2,500 artifacts having to do with scientifically unsupportable beliefs. Compiled by the artist Tony Oursler, it includes photographs, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, books, pamphlets and mechanical devices. Laid out under glass on 35 tables, there are publications and objects by and about Satan worshipers, flat-earthers, witches, magicians, alchemists, mesmerizers, theosophists, spirit photographers and many other imaginative, often fraudulent cosmologists. It’s fun and edifying to peruse. Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., 845-758-7598, bard.edu/ccs. (Johnson)

★ HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN: ‘ROBERT IRWIN: ALL THE RULES WILL CHANGE’ (through Sept. 5) Early in the 1960s, Robert Irwin banned people from photographing his art. Self-identified as a painter at the time, he was in the process of refining his work to the point that it was accessible only through direct experience. To see it at all, you had to be there. In a way, he was proposing a new kind of “action painting.” The action in his version was generated not by the hand of the artist but by the mind and eye of the viewer, approaching art, taking it in, and reacting to it in real time. You will be part of the action, too, in this extraordinary survey, a magical show in which art appears and disappears before your eyes. On the National Mall, at Independence Avenue Southwest and Seventh Street, Washington, 202-633-1618, hirshhorn.si.edu. (Cotter)

★ MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON: ‘DELLA ROBBIA: SCULPTING WITH COLOR IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE’ (through Dec. 4) In Renaissance Florence, art was a form of advertising, pushing hopes and emotions as much as things. One of the most innovative promotional firms was the Della Robbia workshop, its specialty being a popular brand of glazed terra-cotta sculpture that was physically durable, graphically strong and inimitable. That this art could also be dramatically beautiful was a feature nearly forgotten once the style went out of fashion. And for this reason, beauty may be the biggest surprise of the 46 Della Robbia sculptures in Boston, which include one of the tenderest Renaissance sculptures in existence, “The Visitation,” on first-time American loan from its Tuscan church. 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, 617-267-9300, mfa.org. (Cotter)

PARRISH ART MUSEUM: ‘UNFINISHED BUSINESS: PAINTINGS FROM THE 1970S AND 1980S BY ROSS BLECKNER, ERIC FISCHL AND DAVID SALLE’ (through Oct. 16) For contemporary art in America, the 1980s were an exciting if not lovable decade. In contrast with the future-oriented euphoria of the ’60s, the mood of art in that decade was darkly rueful. That downbeat feeling is stirringly conveyed by this exhibition of works by three artists who rose to stardom in the ’80s. It features Mr. Fischl’s paintings depicting traumas of childhood, adolescence and the nuclear family; Mr. Salle’s caustically satirical montages of art and design clichés haunted by ghostly images of nude and nearly nude women; and Mr. Bleckner’s recyclings of geometric abstraction, decorative emblems and spacey illusions into meditations on loss and grief. 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, N.Y., 631-283-2118, parrishart.org. (Johnson)

★ PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART: ‘CREATIVE AFRICA’ (through Sept. 25) The Philadelphia Museum of Art is having a full-fledged African art summer, with a set of five tight, concurrent exhibitions making a richly textured, and in one case sensational, spread. Installed in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building down the hill from the main museum, the offerings include a smartly judged introduction to traditional African material, shows devoted to contemporary architecture and photography, and two more to textile design, the second and larger of which includes a vivacious, runway-style fashion display. The five exhibitions close on different dates, the earliest on Sept. 25. Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Cotter)

STORM KING ART CENTER: ‘DENNIS OPPENHEIM: TERRESTRIAL STUDIO’ (through Nov. 13) From Minimalist earthworks created in remote places in the 1960s to Pop-Surrealist public sculptures for urban settings in the 1990s and 2000s, Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) was dedicated to the proposition that art should be open to the world rather than cloistered in galleries and museums. So it is appropriate that he should be this year’s featured artist at Storm King, where sculptures by Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Alice Aycock and scores of other famous artists dot the beautiful, 500-acre landscape. The exhibition presents seven large-scale outdoor works and a selection of drawings, collages and smaller sculptures indoors. 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, N.Y., 845-534-3115, stormking.org. (Johnson)

★ METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: ‘MANUS X MACHINA: FASHION IN AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGY’ (closes on Sept. 5) The Costume Institute’s latest fashion extravaganza is over the top yet distinguished by clarity and restraint. Presented in plain, ingeniously transformed galleries, it forms a gorgeous tutorial about the narrowing of the gap between traditional haute couture and ready-to-wear, and the integration of handwork and new tech-savvy processes. Dating from throughout the last century but concentrating on the present, the garments tend to be astoundingly beautiful, wildly imaginative or sculpturally challenging. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ MOMA PS1: ‘CAO FEI’ (closes on Thursday) It is a truism of modern life that despite universally connecting communication technologies, demoralizing alienation is as widespread as ever in the developed world. The Chinese artist Cao Fei has founded on this apparent contradiction a series of stirringly plangent and imaginative videos that have been seen in numerous international exhibitions. Her first museum exhibition in the United States ranges from comical student works to “La Town” (2014), a sad, spectacular, 42-minute, apocalyptic disaster movie that consists of roving shots of miniature dioramas representing a small city and its populace devastated by an unknown catastrophe. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084, momaps1.org. (Johnson)

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: The Listings: Art. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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