Below you’ll find a sampling of the museum shows that I’ll be penciling into my schedule during my off-hours in the weeks ahead. I feel it’s only fair to acknowledge that the listings below reflect my glaring biases for certain mediums (photography and works on paper), venues (the fewer tourists the better), and cultural contexts (cross and multi).

I have listed museum website addresses and urge anyone planning a visit to confirm show dates and museum hours. It was only after my fourth visit to the Whitney on a Tuesday that I finally learned that it’s closed that day (and Mondays, too).

Finally, seeing art in the particular institutional setting of a museum is altogether different from experiencing it in a commercial gallery, in a personal studio, or on the street. Don’t let my focus here on museums dissuade you from exploring the over two hundred galleries in Chelsea—all free—or checking out the open studios being hosted by Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and Columbia this April and May.

At the Jewish Museum this spring is an eclectic trio of exhibitions: a look at the 19th century salon culture and the women who hosted them, a retrospective of the beloved illustrator/author Maurice Sendak, and three short video pieces by contemporary Israeli artists (all under ten minutes). Finding an intelligent and succinct connection between these three very different shows is presently beyond me, but I recommend paying a visit to this beautiful museum-in-a-mansion and reporting back with any leads.

“Body Politic: Recent Video by Israeli Artists” Through June 30
“The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons” Through July 10
“Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak” April 15 through August 14

THE JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue (at 92nd St.)
New York, NY 10128
212.423.3200
http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/

Looking for the sleeper hits of the season? Search no further than SMA’s two spring offerings. Chris Ofili’s “Afro Muses” is an exceptional opportunity to see the artist’s ten-year output of watercolors all under one roof. Perhaps recognized more for his sculptures—remember Ofili’s controversial mixing of the scatological and the sacred at the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 Sensation show?—this collection of over one hundred of his works on paper brings Ofili’s more intimate, whimsical side into focus.

“Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse” is the first traveling exhibition devoted to the lives and works of two seminal twentieth century African-American artists. Commonly termed “outsider/folk” artists because of their lack of formal art training (Traylor was born a slave in 1854 and picked up the pencil at the age of eighty-three; a destitute Edmundson began collecting discarded stones and creating sculptures in his sixties), this show seeks to re-contextualize their work within the early twentieth century’s American and European modernist traditions.

“Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse” April 27 through July 3
“Chris Ofili Afro Muses” April 27 through July 3

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM
144 West 125th Street (between Lenox Ave. & Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd.)
New York, New York 10027
212.864.4500
http://www.studiomuseum.org/

“New York is Modern Again.” Does anyone else bear extreme animosity towards the MoMa’s pompous re-opening media campaign? I swore it would take an important show—certainly something more riveting than a multinational corporation’s collection of primarily male, oil on canvas objects to bring me to the MoMa in 2005 (I’m referring here to the other show up at the MoMa this spring, which I am not encouraging you to see).

Well, the Thomas Demand exhibit has brought my boycott to a premature end. The first American museum retrospective for this German photographer is likely to be one of my favorite exhibitions of the year. Demand, once a sculptor, first utilized the camera as a means of recording his three-dimensional pieces. By 1993, he had made the practice of photographing his paper sculptures his central concern; once photographed, the life-size paper models of seemingly everyday scenes are always destroyed. Demand takes as his starting point media images fraught with history—Saddam Hussein’s office, Jeffrey Dahmer’s hallway—and creates life-size reconstructions with what eerily appears to be some industrial size version of children’s construction paper. Demand’s meditations on reality’s transformation at the hands of the media, photography, and the artist are utterly haunting. Very modern indeed.

“Thomas Demand” Through May 30

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
11 W. 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
212.708.9431
http://www.moma.org

Not sure what to make of anime, manga, or Otaku culture? Not confident you could define any of the three if pressed? The Japan Society’s voluminous “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture” is apparently here to change all of that (complete with its own suite of educational programs and film series). Curated by the Japanese art-star Takashi Murakami, the collaborative efforts of the Japan Society and the Public Art Fund provide an extensive, multi-faceted look at the subculture of Otaku and its connection to Japan’s mainstream cultural fascination with childhood cuteness, the apocalypse, and superhuman powers.

“Cool Japan: Otaku Strikes!” Spring 2005
* Be sure to visit the Japan Society’s website for a calendar of events, program descriptions, and venues
JAPAN SOCIETY
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
212.832.1155
http://www.japansociety.org

Just a couple of blocks down Fifth Avenue you’ll find the perfect companion show to the Jewish Museum’s “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salon.” The Neue Galerie’s “Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938” consists of more than 100 photographs from both private and public collections. Now that I think of it, it’s not the prospect of forty years of German photography, but wandering through the old Vanderbilt mansion that I’m looking forward to. “If I had this salon, who would I have over for my weekly soirees....” After you’ve mused to your heart’s content, re-energize in the museum’s Café Sabarsky—the best Linzertorte this side of the Rhine.

“Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938” Through June 6
NEUE GALERIE
1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
New York, NY 10028
212.628.6200
http://www.neuegalerie.org

Without a doubt, Tim Hawkinson’s retrospective at the Whitney is the kid-friendly pick of the season. I have always been struck by the youthfulnes of his larger-than-life sculptures. Hawkinson’s works are generally big and loud, conveying the curiosity and inventiveness of a Peter Pan exploring what it means to be a body in space. Pick an off day at the Whitney to visit the exhibition and have the luxury of getting to know Hawkinson’s sculptures up close.

“Tim Hawkinson” Through May 29

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Tel. 212.570.3633
http://www.whitney.org

I recall seeing Kids (1996) in the movie theater and leaving stunned, disturbed, and secretly, a little dismayed that I hadn’t experienced my teens in a grittier town than the South Florida suburbs. For the past thirty-five years, Larry Clark has unflinchingly portrayed the lives of America’s youth—including the pivotal roles played by violence, sex, and drugs that most of America would rather ignore. (A personal favorite is Clark’s first monograph, Tulsa, from 1971.) This exhibition displays more than 200 of his photographs, many for the first time. Several of Clark’s feature-length films will also be screened.

“Larry Clark” Through June 5

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
212 857 0000
http://www.icp.org