The Big Rollout

The Jugglers, June 24th 2012

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, opens May 23

For his first foray into video art, 75-year-old eternal wunderkind David Hockney used 18 cameras to produce a hothouse-colored riff on his career-long fascination with multiple points of view. To evoke the perspectives of Chinese scroll paintings and Hockney’s own photo-collages, he had a dozen jugglers march across his sunlit studio in Yorkshire to the strains of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Girl With a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings From the Mauritshuis

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, opens June 23

The Mauritshuis, the Dutch royal picture gallery in the Hague, is closed for renovations, so dozens of its treasures are touring. Next stop, the High, which will show off 35 works that include four original Rembrandts, a moody van Ruisdael landscape and Vermeer’s mesmerizing Girl, who emerges from the shadows to cast her famously enigmatic gaze, hinting at something–what is it?–that’s strictly between her and you.

St. Louis Art Museum Expansion

Opens June 29

Like so many of the great old American museums, the St. Louis, built in 1904, is a potent exercise in neoclassical might and beaux arts splendor (this one by Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building and the U.S. Supreme Court). Adding a new wing is British modernist David Chipperfield, whose glass-and-concrete annex will increase the museum’s public space by 30%–and its public profile by an amount that time will tell.

Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, opens June 29

If you like your alienation deadpan funny, then you may already love Daniel Clowes, the Chicago-born cartoonist whose pioneering graphic novel Ghost World is the Madame Bovary of adolescent angst. In more than 125 drawings, paintings, New Yorker covers and other choice creations, MCA Chicago charts his mastery of modern misery.

Cyclepedia

Portland Art Museum, opens June 8

Cycle-loving Portland, Ore., is the perfect site for a survey of 40 or so high points in the evolution of bicycles. The artifacts are from the collection of Michael Embacher, a Vienna-based designer whose hoard of tandem bikes, folding bikes, racers and customized two-wheeled oddities celebrates the efficient beauty of the only clean-energy machine that can also pop a wheelie.

James Turrell

Three venues: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens May 26; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, opens June 9; Guggenheim Museum rotunda, New York City, opens June 21

If ever an artist deserved a transcontinental retrospective, it’s Turrell: a key figure of the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Turrell has always thought big, making sunlight, space and the sky itself into his prime materials.