In his grandiose landscape paintings, Frederic Edwin Church staked out that typically American space between the sideshow and the sublime.

The imprisoned Chinese painter and writer Mu Xin blended East and West in his misty landscapes—and saved himself in the process.

Lee Krasner
Brooklyn Museum of Art; through January 7.
Edward Steichen
Whitney Museum of American Art; through February 4.

Alexander Girard splashed the gray face of postwar minimalism with a riot of color and infused modernist intellectual design with the giddy warmth of folk art.

Critics scoffed at Morris Lapidus's Fontainebleau and Summit hotels, but actual people loved their swoops and angles.

Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art From the British Museum
Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island

By embracing the past, contemporary Buddhist art—much in vogue—helps center us in the present.

A Guggenheim exhibit of his works from the World War II era amounts to a case for Picasso as the quintessential twentieth-century artist.

An International Center of Photography look at the evolution of racial attitudes makes one wonder, How far have we really come?

Wayne Thiebaud
At the Whitney Museum of American Art; through 9/23.