Lari Pittman, Untitled #11, 2003. Matte oil, aerosol lacquer, and Cel-Vinyl on gessoed canvas, 76 x 102 inches. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London © Lari Pittman.

In this week’s roundup Lari Pittman arrives in the Midwest, Alfredo Jaar revisits Venice Biennale, Kalup Linzy casts Michael Stipe, David Altmejd explores paradise, Marina Abramovic appears in an opera about her life, and more.

• Lari Pittman: A Decorated Chronology is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis). The exhibition includes 30 large-scale paintings and a 24-part works on paper series from Lari Pittman. Most of the works are from the mid-2000s to the present, as well as earlier works dating back to 1985 that have been borrowed from museums and private collections from across the U.S. The show closes August 11.

• Alfredo Jaar has a site-specific installation, Venezia, Venezia, on view at the Pavilion of Chile, Venice Biennale (Italy). It invites viewers to question the role of the Venice Biennale in a worldwide culture that has perhaps outgrown it. The exhibition runs through November 24.

• Mika Tajima is in a group show at Galeria Quadrado Azul (Porto, Portugal). Artists at Art Brussels includes artists who participated in the April 2013 international contemporary art fair Art Brussels. The show closes July 31.

• David Altmejd and other artists reflect on the art historical significance of a Garden of Eden and the contemporary social significance of a paradise at Middelheim Museum (Antwerp). My Little Paradise (Mijn kleine paradijs) is located in the former Hortiflora flower garden that was the source of inspiration for the exhibition theme. The artists’ works represent the theme of a small, personal paradise. The show is on view through September 15.

• Conversations wit de Churen X: One Life to Heal, a new video by Kalup Linzy, revisits characters that have appeared in his past films including All My Churen (2003). Michael Stipe and Leo Fitzpatrick appear alongside Linzy in the latest installment of the fictional Braswell family saga.

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Jeff Koons. “Antiquity 3,” 2009–11. Oil on canvas 102 x 138 in. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian New York.

In this week’s roundup Jeff Koons layers ancient sculptures and popular images, Charles Atlas collaborates with sound artists, Ai Wei Wei explores medical disaster in Hong Kong, Maya Lin is interviewed, and more.

• Jeff Koons‘s first major solo exhibition is up at Gagosian (New York, NY). New Paintings and Sculpture features The Antiquity paintings (2009–13) in which Koons layers scenes from famous ancient sculptures with images and figures of popular culture. Here, he explores the back and forth movement between two and three dimensions that underpin the artist’s work. The exhibition runs through June 29.

• Charles Atlas collaborated with the sound artists New Humans on a multimedia project for Frieze Sounds 2013 (New York, NY). Atlas and New Humans present a new aural experience, utilizing electronically fractured vocals. Displaying a poem-like babble of unrelated words, the work articulates the flow of materials, information and people extracted from distant places. The sound project is available for download here.

• Ai Wei Wei will be part of a group exhibition at Para Site and Sheung Wan Civic Centre Exhibition Hall (Hong Kong). A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, ghosts, rebels. SARS, Leslie and the Hong Kong story starts with the events that affected Hong Kong in the spring of 2003. Ai’s piece explores anti-mainland sentiment, seen by organizers as an indirect consequence of a severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak. The show runs May 16–July 20.

• Janine Antoni and Anastasia Ax will discuss their work as part of Brooklyn Commons (NYC), a discussion series at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, NY) that presents intellectual and artistic pairings between the established Brooklyn-based artist community and ISCP residents. Antoni and Ax will consider sculptural production in relation to process and the body. The event takes place May 14 at 6:3opm.

• Mike Kelley‘s last major installation officially opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Mobile Homestead represents the fruition of a shared dream—for the artist, the friends who miss him, the museum that will tend to his memory, and a community that begins in the Motor City and potentially extends throughout the world. The show is on view through July 28.

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Lynda Benglis. “Scarab,” 1990. Stainless steel mesh, aluminum. 52 x 75 x 16 in.

In this week’s roundup, Lynda Benglis manipulates metal, Julie Mehretu and Matthew Ritchie explore diagrams, Shahzia Sikander flows poetic, and more.

• Lynda Benglis‘s work is on view at the Locks Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Everything Flows features, among other works, the artist’s Pleat pieces. For these, Benglis manipulated fragments of folded mesh and sprayed them with liquid metal. The results are ”buoyantly, ebulliently, kinetically fluid-like giant, festively crinkled, artlessly tied bows undergoing their various twists, turns and knots,” writes art historian Anna Chave in her accompanying essay. The exhibition closes June 15.

• Matthew Ritchie has organized a group show for Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York, NY). The Temptation of the Diagram explores the diagram as an essential mode of artistic practice, and expands on themes that Ritchie studied during his residency at the Getty Research Institute (2012) and recently at Columbia University. Works by Julie Mehretu are included in the show, which closes April 27.

• Shahzia Sikander was commissioned by curator Yuko Hasegawa to create site specific work for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates). Poetry is a key theme across Sikander’s contributions, including a moving image installation and public performance. The Biennal closes May 13.

• Focus: Barry McGee, now on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Forth Worth, TX), focuses on McGee‘s development since the early 1990s. Organized by curator Andrea Karnes, she will be in conversation with McGee on April 23 at 7pm. The event is free and open to the public. The exhibition closes June 2.

• Cindy Sherman‘s retrospective exhibition has traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX). Cindy Sherman traces the artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present, and features 160 photographs from her various bodies of work. The exhibition closes June 9.

• Cindy Sherman, William Wegman, and Kalup Linzy all have work on view in the two-part exhibition Serious Laughs: Art, Politics, Humor at the Ulster Performing Arts Center (Kingston, NY). By transforming the theater into a gallery space, the UPAC calls attention to their “role as the arts anchor of the City of Kingston.” The first installment of the exhibition is already on display at the Kingston Public Library. The second installment opens at the UPAC on April 20 and runs through May 12.

• Trenton Doyle Hancock will lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA) on April 15 at 7:30pm. Hancock will address his transformation of traditional elements such as color, language, and pattern into characters and subplots. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited and advance registration is recommended.

• Maya Lin recently gave a talk at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH). In anticipation of her presentation, the Wexner released a new video about Lin’s important project Groundswell (1993). Watch below.

Maya Lin. “Sliver Thames,” 2012. Recycled silver. 78 x 19 x .05 in. Courtesy the artist and Pace London.

In this week’s roundup, Maya Lin explores the topography of Europe, Roni Horn displays photographs and glass, Rashid Johnson highlights artistic contributions by women and minorities, and much more.

• Maya Lin‘s latest exhibition is up at Pace London. Maya Lin Here and There explores Lin’s longtime interest in environmental issues and expanding engagement with natural and geographic forms. In the works on view at Pace she focuses on the geography and topography of Europe and surrounding regions. The show closes May 11.

• Fred Wilson has reproduced his radical 1993 installation Local Color at the Studio Museum of Harlem (NYC). The show features objects that Wilson bought along 125th Street (just outside of the museum) together with traditional African and Caribbean artifacts from Studio’s collection. On view through June 30.

• Roni Horn is showing new sculptures and photographs at Hauser & Wirth Zürich. Simply titled Roni Horn, the exhibition showcases the artist’s creative explorations into the “effect of multiplicity on perception and memory.” On view through May 25.

• Rashid Johnson is the 2012 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize by the High Museum of Art. In conjunction with the award, Johnson will lecture on the contributions of women and minorities in the visual arts. The event, part of the Claudia DeMonte Lecture Series, will take place on April 3 at the David C. Driskell Center (College Park, MD). The lecture begins at 5:30pm, following a one-hour public reception.

• Mark Bradford‘s Father, You Have Murdered Me (2012) is on view at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. On the matter of abstraction (figs. A & B) features post-war non-figurative works drawn from the Rose’s permanent collection. On view through June 9.

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Mika Rottenberg. “Felicia from Tropical Breeze,” 2004. Courtesy the artist and Magasin 3, Stockholm.

In this week’s roundup, the Empire State travels to Rome with works by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jeff Koons, Pierre Huyghe wins the Haftmann Prize, Laylah Ali’s Greenheads meet up in Minneapolis, several artists lecture about their work, and more.

• Shahzia Sikander ‘Parallax’ opens this week at Pilar Corrias Gallery (London). This is Sikander‘s second solo show with Pilar. The installation includes a new three-channel animation that will also be shown at the Sharjah Biennial in March 2013. Accompanying the animation are four large scale drawings and four smaller works on paper. On February 20, the gallery will present Writing with Drawing, a public conversation between the artist and Kate Macfarlane. Please RSVP as space is limited. The exhibition runs February 22–March 13.

• Maya Lin will give a talk at the Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona) as part of Contemporary Forum’s monthly lecture program, organized by the museum’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sara Cochran. According to Cochran, it has been a priority of the museum to bring Lin to Phoenix. The event takes place on February 20.

• Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series is now on view at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN). This is the first time the Greenheads series, created between 1996 and 2005, is being shown as a comprehensive body of work. Of the more than eighty gouache paintings in Ali‘s series, the exhibition presents forty-three that have been gathered from various collections. The show runs through May 12.

• Arturo Herrera has a new show opening this week at Linda Pace Foundation (San Antonio, TX). Arturo Herrera will feature works from the Foundation’s collection, and more recent works by the artist on loan from Sikkema Jenkins & Co. On February 21 at 6pm, the Foundation will present a conversation between Herrera and Artpace Executive Director Amada Cruz. The exhibition runs February 22–September 6.

• Pierre Huyghe has won this year’s Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Prizewinners are selected solely on the basis of the artistic significance and “outstanding quality” of their work, without regard to their personal circumstances (nationality, age, gender, etc). Huyghe will be fêted at an award ceremony at the Kunsthaus Zurich in May. Cindy Sherman was winner of last year’s Haftmann Prize.

• LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jeff Koons will exhibit work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome) in the group exhibition Empire State, which explores how artists have reimagined urban life in New York City. Bringing together an intergenerational group of artists from the city’s five boroughs and suburban and exurban regions, some works on view are meditations on the city as a means of distributing power. The show runs April 23–July 21.

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Ai Weiwei. “Grass-Mud Horse Style,” 2012. Image courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup, William Kentridge films to be shown at the New Museum, Gabriel Orozco talks at the Guggenheim, a Fred Wilson magazine feature and lecture, Laurie Simmons is honored, Ai Weiwei covers “Gangnam Style” and much more.

• William Kentridge‘s animated films will be shown at the New Museum (NYC). Felix in Exile (1994), Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), and Shadow Procession (1999), were all included in the exhibition William Kentridge, the artist’s first career survey in the United States. This special Get Weird program pairs Kentridge with Alexis Gideon, an emerging animator and songwriter. The event takes place November 2, 7pm.

• Gabriel Orozco will talk at the Guggenheim Museum (NYC). For Conversations with Contemporary Artists: Gabriel Orozco with Benjamin Buchloh the artist will talk about his practice and his work in Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms, on view from November 9, 2012–January 13, 2013. The artist talk will take place on November 13 at 6:30pm.

• Laurie Simmons was honored by the Aurora Picture Show (Houston, TX). The Aurora Award is an honor given to an artist who has exhibited extraordinary originality in the fields of media and multimedia art. The event took place on October 16.

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Carrie Mae Weems. "Afro-Chic (video still)," 2010. DVD, 5 minutes, 30 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems.

In this week’s roundup voting is open for a video portrait of John Baldessari, Martha Colburn’s cut out animation is showcased, Ann Hamilton works with factory workers, an upcoming Carrie Mae Weems retrospective and more.

• Martha Colburn‘s work will be showcased in Harsh Realities at the Rowan University Art Gallery (Glassboro, NJ). The exhibition is a survey of stop-motion animation, including puppets, clay sculptures, toys, dolls, surface-altering textures, and more. The show explores how stop-motion animation is so often used to underline the resilience of the human spirit within difficult and challenging circumstances. This work will be on view September 4 – October 6.

• Watch a portrait of John Baldessari in A Brief History of John Baldessari. Narrator Tom Waits guides you through a montage of the highlights of Baldessari’s life and career. You can also vote for the film at the official site of the ShortList Film Festival through Sept. 4.

• Ann Hamilton is participating in Factory Direct: Pittsburgh that showcases the artwork of established contemporary artists who conducted artist residencies in Pittsburgh-based factories. Artists worked closely with the management teams and factory workers within their host facilities to plan and execute a new work of art based on the factory’s history, technologies, materials, or processes. The exhibition is on view through September 9.

• Jessica Stockholder will soon lecture at Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. During this afternoon talk she will speak about how her work has played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting, form and space. The event is scheduled for September 11, 4:30pm.

• Mark your calendar for Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video at the Frist Center for the Arts (Nashville, TN). This retrospective, which is composed of more than 200 objects—primarily photographs but also written texts, audio recordings, fabric banners and videos—will provide an opportunity to trace the evolution of Carrie Weems’s career over the last 30 years. The exhibition will run September 21 – January 12, 2013 and move to several other venues next year.

• Himmel Award & Lecture: Maya Lin at the Katonah Museum of Art honors Maya Lin, who draws inspiration from the landscape, asking the viewer to reconsider nature at a time when it is crucial to do so. The artist is currently at work on her last memorial, What is Missing?, a multi-sited artwork that raises awareness about the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. The event takes place on November 4, 5pm.

• Maya Lin is also teaming up with Cannon Design and Toshiko Mori, FAIA, to design a new, innovative research campus for Novartis, a pharmaceutical company. The new campus will change the way Novartis conducts research, promoting increased collaboration, idea-sharing and teamwork. The project will be completed in 2015.

Barbara Kruger. "Belief+Doubt," 2012. Photo by Cathy Carver. Courtesy the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

In this week’s roundup Barbara Kruger lands at the Hirshhorn, Oliver Herring is nominated for an award, Robert Adams shapes his legacy and more.

• Barbara Kruger‘s Belief + Doubt opens soon at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington DC). This work is part of an initiative to bring art to new sites within and around the building. The installation by Barbara Kruger will fill the lower level lobby and extend into the newly relocated Museum bookstore. The exhibit opens August 20.

• Oliver Herring is listed among the nominees for the 2012 contemporary artist award from Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC). In 2001, the museum established a contemporary artist award. This award recognizes an artist younger than fifty who demonstrates exceptional creativity and has produced a significant body of artwork that is considered emblematic of this period in contemporary art. The winner will be announced soon.

• Laurie Anderson is performing Dirtday!, a piece that looks at politics, theories of evolution, families, and history. Set against a sound-based landscape, this collection of stories and music is the third and last in a series of solo performances, which includes Happiness and The End of the Moon. Anderson begins her US. tour at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art on September 16 and Cal Performances on September 18, with more performances to come.

• Maya Lin will display several of her pieces at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Expo Chiacgo booth, including Reversing the Flow, a topographical map of the Chicago River made entirely of pins. A sound/video installation from What is Missing?, her final memorial about endangered species and ecosystems, will also be on display. These pieces will draw attention to NRDC’s continued efforts to create a healthy and safe Chicago River: from fighting the practice of dumping raw sewage into the waterway, to addressing the threat of Asian carp and other invasive species. This event will take place at Navy Pier from September 20–23.

• Kara Walker recently lectured at the Atlanta Cyclorama & Civil War Museum located in Grant Park. Her talk, The Art of War, is part of an ongoing Civil War Summer series, The American Civil War: One-Hundred-Fifty Years Later. The series was initiated by The City of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs and the Cyclorama.

• Robert Adams has been working with curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, selecting 169 prints from his own holdings for the museum to acquire. This selection will complement 25 images by Adams that the gallery already owns.

• Jeff Koons recently visited the Colbert Report with late-night host Stephen Colbert to discuss the Koonsian aesthetic. The satirical interview can be viewed online.

Gabriel Orozco. "Astroturf Constellation," 2012. Image courtesy the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Gabriel Orozco exhibits detritus, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith and Carrie Mae Weems are honored, Sally Mann in Stockholm and more.

• Gabriel Orozco has chosen to exhibit two collections of artwork at Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin). Sandstars is culled from the wildlife reserve in Isla Arena, Mexico, and Astroturf Constellation take as its inspiration a soccer field on pier 40 in New York City.  Asterisms was arranged from collections of detritus to create a catalog of human and natural impacts on two separate environments, one organic, and the other manufactured. This work is on view through October 21.

• Cai Guo-Qiang, Jeff Koons, Shahzia Sikander, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems have been selected in recognition of their commitment to the ART in Embassies Program (AIE) mission of furthering diplomacy through the visual arts and expansive cultural exchange initiatives. AIE will be honoring these artists for its 50th Anniversary in Washington, D.C. on November 30, 2012.

Julie Mehretu. "Untitled," 2012. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94.

In this week’s roundup, Julie Mehretu and Janine Antoni cross borders and cultures, Kiki Smith designs an outdoor fountain, Mark Bradford collaborates with Benjamin Millepied, and more.

• Julie Mehretu‘s work is in Pothole at Salon 94 (NYC). This exhibition features work that assumes a “21st century virtual form, crossing cities and borders.” The group exhibition is an artistic dialogue based on diverse practices that have commonalities including a strong expressionist sensibility as well as an attraction to untraditional, handmade and often “low” materials. Pothole celebrates Mehretu and her colleagues and friends. The work is on view through July 6.

• Lucas Blalock is part of a group show at Richard Telles Fine Art (Los Angeles). In Formwandler Blalock contributes photographs depicting ordinary objects that become estranged from the norm. Mixing digital images with “objective” reality, the artist wills a crease in the apparent seamlessness of lies captured by the camera. Embracing every genre, trick, or technique in the book, Blalock helps initiate a renewed shift in the materiality and space within the photographic image. This show closes August 18.

• Kiki Smith designed an outdoor fountain for Tyra Banks’ TZONE, to be located at the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) in New York City. The resource center will also include a commercial training kitchen, screening room, health and wellness center, art studio, planetarium, and rooftop farm. The building is set to open in January 2013 as the permanent home of the LESGC.

• Janine Antoni and several other artists have work on view spanning two boroughs in New York City. Caribbean: Crossroads of the World has over 500 works on display including painting, sculpture, artist books, photography, video, and historical artifacts from Caribbean countries, Europe, and the U.S. Located at El Museo del Barrio (through January 6, 2013), the Queens Museum of Art (also through January 6), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (through October 21), this exhibition concludes over a decade of collaborative research on the Caribbean, its people, nations, and artistic currents.

• Mark Bradford will soon collaborate with choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s LA Dance Project that will make a sneak-peak debut July and August, with performances in the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA Grand Avenue). Millepied is creating a 30-minute, site-specific duet, Framework, to a narrated soundtrack by Bradford. This performance was inspired by two large Bradford paintings in MOCA’s current exhibition “The Painting Factory: Art After Warhol,” Untitled (2011) and Ghost and Stooges (2011).

• Maya Lin was interviewed by Yale Environment 360 contributor Diane Toomey. In Maya Lin: A Memorial to A Vanishing Natural World the artist talks about the origins of her What is Missing? project, the media techniques she and her collaborators are using to draw attention to the biodiversity crisis, and the actions that give her hope that we can reverse the tide of nature’s destruction.

• Louise Bourgeois‘ Spider 1 is on view in the Grand Gallery on the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History. This work is part of Spiders Alive!, an exhibition that features 42,000 species of spiders from around the world. This exhibition closes December 2.