A leading member of the Czech avant-garde in the 1920s and ’30s, cofounder of the Czech Photographic Society, and an influential teacher, Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) produced abstract still lifes and images of modern and classical architecture whose provocative play of shadows and forms invites comparisons to the work of Atget, Man Ray, Morandi, and Sheeler. Rather than highlighting these affinities, however, the first extensive show of Funke’s photographs outside Europe displays his lyric imagery alongside that of twenty-two of his compatriots, including Josef Sudek and Eugen Wiškovský. Some seventy works will contextualize this lesser known movement of self-taught photographers within the interwar explosion of avant-garde art.

Amy Blakemore’s photographs—of discarded shoes, gathering clouds, a child in a crowd—proffer open-ended narratives. That dreamlike opacity is augmented by her use of low-tech Diana cameras, which produce pictures with softly focused edges and blurred resolutions. The MFAH’s selection of thirty-six works from the past two decades—the artist’s first midcareer survey—tracks Blakemore’s transition from black-and-white to color, and considers how her casual snapshot aesthetic is married to a conceptual engagement with photography’s capacity to distort memory. The photographs are atmospheric in several senses: They capture a mood but also depict a hazy quality of light that feels related to the distinctively viscous air of Houston, where Blakemore has lived since 1985. A catalogue featuring essays by Alison de Lima Greene, Whitney curator Chrissie Iles, and others accomp... Read more »

Pneumatic dreams hover over the work of Tomás Saraceno, just as they wafted through the hot-air balloons of the frères Montgolfier or the late-1960s inflatable architecture of the Utopie group. But if it seems that all we got from such techno-futurism was puffy IKEA chairs, Saraceno won’t let the bubble burst. His airborne structures and blow-up sculptures are actually prototypes for floating gardens or houses. Such constructions—along with photographs, drawings, and a new installation for the Walker’s terrace—are the focus of “Lighter than Air,” the artist's second solo US museum show (the first being at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in 2007). Other pieces in the exhibition, such as 59 steps to be on air by sun power/Do it yourself, 2003, a set of simple instructions for making a solar-powered balloon, are more Mad Max than Bucky Fuller—rerouting utop... Read more »

Central to the modernist project has been a methodical questioning of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe, which this show positions specifically in relation to contemporaneous scientific research on phenomena such as the big bang and black holes. In turn, fundamental existential and metaphysical questions—What is space? What is time?—are reposed by artists and philosophers alike, opening up radically new perspectives on knowledge and experience. Unusual in its historical breadth, with more than eighty works from 1933 to the present, the show is accompanied by an equally expansive catalogue: Diverse contributors include curator Peter Eleey, philosophers Peter Osborne and Ina Blom, and neurologist Olaf Blanke.

Views of “Not New Work: Vincent Fecteau Selects from the Collection,” 2009. Left (from left to right): Eric Rudd, Night Fairy, 1974; Max Ernst, Bauta, 1964; Ron Nagle, Untitled, 1982; Peter Young, Untitled, 1968; Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Two Ice Cream Scoops on Plate), ca. 1985. Right: Robert Overby, Hall painting, first floor; H. C. Westermann, Secrets, 1964; Charles Howard, Banner, 1934; Christopher Wilmarth, New, 1968; Ralph Humphrey, Untitled, 1972. (Photos: Ian Reeves)

Vincent Fecteau was perhaps an ideal choice for an “artist selects” exhibition: His own sculptures are potent, peculiarly honed works that take months to produce, and the twenty-three objects he culled from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s storage facilities reveal as much about the quirks of a collection as they do about the vision of an artist set free within it. Pieces by the likes of Judy Chicago, Ron Nagle, and Tom of Finland will be on view through November 8 at the museum under the fitting title ... Read more »

Left: Mary Ellen Carroll moderating "NOZONE: Houston’s Mayoral Forum on Land Use" at prototype180—the table, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, July 9, 2009. Right: Mary Ellen Carroll and KHOU-TV reporter David Fehling at prototype180, Sharpstown, Houston. (Photos: Kenny Trice)

Mary Ellen Carroll is a Houston- and New York–based conceptual artist who teaches in the architecture program at Rice University. Here, she discusses prototype 180, a work she is creating in collaboration with the Rice University Building Institute, and a recent mayoral forum on land use in Houston at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that she organized and moderated. Her forthcoming monograph is being published by SteidlMACK and will be available this fall.

HOUSTON IS THE ONLY METROPOLITAN AREA in the United States without a formal land-use zoning code. The no-zoning policy creates conditions, both physical and atmospheric, for extending free enterprise over the city, the energy capital of the world. ... Read more »

Left: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Velvet Hand, 2009, chair, vase, velvet pants, 33 x 21 x 20". Right: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Denim Vase, 2009, ceramic, denim, 9 x 7 x 5".

This summer, the Portland, Oregon– and New York–based sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins is participating in several group exhibitions, including “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and is at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until November 29, and “Bent,” a three-person show at the Oregon College of Art and Craft on view until August 23. Here, Hutchins talks about her practice.

I’VE BEEN MAKING A LOT OF WORK FROM MY FURNITURE LATELY, just pulling it out of my house. Two sculptures in “Bent” are created from chairs that were in my kitchen. They were worn out, and their indentations readily invited the weight of ceramic. For Velvet Hand, I sewed some old velvet pants together to hold a pot that hovers over the indentation of the seat... Read more »

Left: Cindy Workman, No. 42, 2000, Lambda print, Plexiglas, mounting hardware, 60 3/4 x 48 1/2". Right: Cindy Workman, Large Woman 17, 2006, digital print, Plexiglas, frame, 56 3/4 x 41 3/4".

For the past two decades, multimedia artist Cindy Workman has created collage-based art, incorporating images from such incongruous sources as children’s drawings, vintage pornography, and mathematical diagrams. Her first United States retrospective is on view through August 14 at Lennon, Weinberg in New York.

THE RETROSPECTIVE WAS CURATED to highlight the central theme of my work: women. From early on, I’ve had a keen interest in "woman as object." Although I wouldn’t say that this has disappeared in the newer pieces, my last show included individual portraits of women who weren’t seen totally as objects. Narrative has also crept into the work––not storytelling per se, but rather a linear situation in which I interrogate gender, specifically themes such as what it means to be a woman, the... Read more »

Left: Aki Sasamoto and Momus, Love is the End of Art, 2009. Performance view. Zach Feuer Gallery, New York. Right: Aki Sasamoto, Secrets of my Mother’s Child, 2009. Performance view. Living Room Festival, Auckland. (Photo: Rob Garrett.)

Aki Sasamoto is a New York–based Japanese artist who often draws on performance, sculpture, and dance for her works. Here she describes her sense of dislocation after performing and also talks about her role as a founder of Culture Push, the collaborative artists’ group. She recently performed at Zach Feuer Gallery (with Momus) and in the 2008 Yokohama Triennial.

THROUGHOUT JUNE, I experienced a sense of the unreal and constant self-doubt. A friend pointed out that I always take my time to return to real life after a performance and that I had spent the previous two months performing almost every day in four different shows. I thought I had bored her with my disorientation stories. (Is it like having an easily dislocated shoulder: no longer surp... Read more »

Left: Cover of Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (2009). Right: A view of Broadway in Times Square, New York. (Photo: Lisa Davidson)

Michael Sorkin is a New York–based architect, urban planner, educator, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Variations on a Theme Park (1991), Exquisite Corpse (1994), and After the World Trade Center (2002). His latest book, which examines the history and changing face of New York through the lens of his morning commute, is Twenty Minutes in Manhattan.

THE IDEA FOR THE BOOK CAME ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. Walks are contemplative times and spaces, and going over the same territory day after day gave me the opportunity to see things over the relatively longue durée: construction projects, seasonal activities, changes in commercial life, in culture, in the population. After dilating internally on the happy accidents produced by the city and on the quality of my immediate environment, I thought I’d begin to write ab... Read more »