What to See Across America This June

Antonia Kuo | Chapter NY, New York | 18 April – 14 June

‘Milk of the Earth’, Antonia Kuo’s first solo exhibition at Chapter NY, pairs fresh examples of her chemical paintings – which use light-sensitive paper in exciting and unconventional ways – with several of her enigmatic sculptures. Combined with her use of diamond-patterned expanded steel mesh, a palette of caustic earth tones and acidic greens evokes industrial processes and toxic ingredients. While visible brushstrokes and graphic contours signal direct authorship, Kuo’s materials also feel like active agents. Her compositions possess the entropic complexity of spontaneous reactions: processes where the flow of energy can be predicted but never fully controlled. – Peter Brock

Steina | Buffalo AKG Art Museum | 14 March – 30 June 

It has become commonplace to imagine our world through the ‘eyes’ of machines – Google Street View, for example, enables this perspective by guiding users through visual landscapes made by cars with 360-degree cameras attached to their roofs. Steina, a pioneering media artist, anticipated the use of this technology more than 30 years prior to the release of the Google product with her film From Cheektowaga to Tonawanda (1975), which pans the landscapes of upstate New York with similar equipment to the cloud-based software: not to consolidate corporate control over emerging technologies but for artistic ends. – Lauren Stroh

‘a field of bloom and hum’ | Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs | 14 February – 20 July 

In Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002), art historian Douglas Crimp writes that ‘AIDS activism does not speak of representation or make representations with a single voice’. Crimp’s thoughts on the politics of representation were front of mind as I navigated ‘a field of bloom and hum’ at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs. From paintings, prints and photographs to textiles, sculptures and performance documentation, the exhibition assembles works from the early 20th century to the present by more than 140 artists, offering expansive portrayals of the rich and diverse communities of queer culture. – James Voorhies

Pedro Gómez-Egaña | MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge | 21 February – 27 July

How do we experience the interdependence of space and time? Pedro Gómez-Egaña takes up this question in his first US solo show with a rare combination of gravity and a light touch. On view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, ‘The Great Learning’ probes the temporal architecture of daily life, with the artist drawing on his background in music composition, sculpture, installation and performance. The breadth of his interests is matched only by the size of his library, but familiarity with the texts he cites is not essential for visitors. As one exclaimed upon exiting the show: ‘In each room I was transformed, without even having to think about it.’ It’s the experience – engaged, constructive – as much as the content of reading and listening that is Gómez-Egaña’s focus. – Helen Miller

^{Main image: PaJaMa, Silhouettes (The Frenches), Hawthorne House, Provincetown (detail), 1947, gelatin silver print. Courtesy: Tang Teaching Museum and Tang Museum collection, Jack Shear Collection of Photography}