Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Apr. 3-May 31, 2009
Local color from the MIA’s "Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program," featuring Robinson’s vibrant self-portraits as fantasy characters alongside Belleau’s photos illustrating Bible, Torah and Qur'an stories as well as "life in a modern Minnesota vernacular"
Funding: Jerome Foundation

MASS MoCA
Apr. 4, 2009-Feb. 28, 2010
In what is described as a curatorial riff on a 1967 Jackson Browne lyric ("These days I seem to think about / How all the changes came about my ways / And I wonder if I'll see another highway"), this show brings together six artists -- George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Pawel Wojtasik -- who offer elegiac commentary about the state of the world
Funding: Artist's Resource Trust, a Fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Culture Ireland, USG

San Jose Museum of Art
Apr. 4-Aug. 16, 2009
56 prints by a range of women artists, including Anni Albers, Squeak Carnwath, Barbara Kruger, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Suzanne Caporeal, Fay Jones, Judy Pfaff, Kiki Smith, Wangechi Mutu, Vija Celmins and Kara Walker
Funding: McManis Faulkner

Hammer Museum
Apr. 5-June 28, 2009
120 "intimate" works on paper, including prints, drawings, illustrated books and portfolios, by figures such as Félix Bracquemond, Victor Hugo, Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon and James McNeill Whistler
Curator: Peter Parshall
Catalogue: 192 pp., $70
Tour: National Gallery of Art, Oct. 1, 2009-Jan. 18, 2010; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Feb. 11-June 10, 2010

New Museum
Apr. 8-June 14, 2009
Hotly anticipated, mega-hyped, super-cool roundup of 50 emerging international artists, all under the age of 33, the first in a proposed series of New Museum Triennials
Curators: Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, Laura Hoptman
Catalogue: Younger Than Jesus: The Reader, 204 pp., $45; The Younger than Jesus Artist Directory, 480 pp., $49.95
Funding: Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Guggenheim Museum
Apr. 10-July 19, 2009
Site-specific installations by Mexican artist Julieta Aranda that promise to "challenge the idea of time as a linear progression marked by clocks, calendars and other devices," part of a new series at the Guggenheim dedicated to locating works by emerging artists in "interstitial" spaces within the famous building
Curator: Nancy Spector, Katherine Brinson

High Museum of Art
Apr. 11-Aug. 23, 2009
26 paintings, eight architectural models and one dinnerware set by Atlanta-based architect Anthony Ames, best known for his 1984 "Hulse House"
Curator: Ron Labaco

MOCA at Goldman Warehouse, Miami
Apr. 11-June 27, 2009
The first major solo museum exhibition of Luis Gispert, the Brooklyn-based artist known for works that explore kitsch and artifice in Latino-Latina culture
Curator: Bonnie Clearwater

Detroit Institute of Arts
Apr. 15-July 12, 2009
The Depression-era pictures of Roman Vishniac, who photographed throughout Poland's Jewish communities, alongside work by contemporary photographer Jeffrey Gusky, who captured many of the same Polish sites during the 1990s
Curator: Karen Sinsheimer
Funding: Bill and Karen Davidson, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of Detroit

National Academy Museum
Apr. 16-June 10, 2009
189 artist-members of National Academy exhibit their work

Grey Art Gallery, NYU
Apr. 16-29, 2009
More than 50 sculptures and 40 drawings in a selling exhibition -- yes, the works are for sale, at prices between $35,000 and $65,000, with proceeds benefiting the Grey -- by the Wall Street entrepreneur and former publisher of the New York Observer, who is chairman of NYU’s board of overseers of the faculty of arts and sciences. Carter began making abstract sculpture in stainless steel and bronze in 1990, and exhibited his work at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in 2000 and 2002, and at the Tennessee State Museum in 2005.
Catalogue: $15, with essay by Carey Lovelace, as well as a second book, Arthur Carter: Sculptures, Paintings, and Drawings, with essays by Charles A. Riley and Peter Kaplan, 225 pp., Abrams, $50

Henry Art Gallery, Seattle
Apr. 18, 2009-Aug. 23, 2009
A trilogy of digital-animation installations based on seminal works of science fiction: J.G. Ballard’s Crystal World, Ursela K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Samuel R. Delany’s Bellona
Curator: Elizabeth Brown
Funding: Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, ArtsFund, Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Art, Scan¦Design by Inger & Jens Bruun Foundation

Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Park
Apr. 20-Oct. 11, 2009
Dutch artist Guido Van der Werve’s incredible film, Nummer  Acht (#8) everything is going to be alright (2007), featuring the artist walking unperturbed across an icy sea as a ship breaks through the ice at his heels

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Apr. 21-Aug. 2, 2009
The first museum tribute to the media-smart New York artists who invented "postmodernism": Troy Brauntuch, James Casebere, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons, David Salle, James Welling, others
Curator: Douglas Eklund
Catalogue: $50, 352 pp.
Funding: William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Apr. 24-Sept. 27, 2009
An exhibition asking the question of "what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art," via works by Kris Martin, Lygia Clark, Pierre Huyghe and Michael Sailstorfer, with installations sited on the Walker’s parking ramp and in the nearby Basilica of Saint Mary’s, as well as in the galleries
Funding: Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, David Teiger Foundation

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
Apr. 24-Aug. 2, 2009
The Philadelphia-based jazz pioneer, mystic philosopher and Afro-Futurist Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914-1993), via a collection artworks and ephemera produced by Ra and his associates, much of it never before seen. The show includes original drawings for Sun Ra album sleeves, the unpublished manuscript of The Magic Lie, a book of Ra’s poetry, and Spaceways, Edward English’s 1968 film of the Arkestra preparing to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Apr. 25-July 19, 2009
Not so much an exhibition as an homage in wall labels, "A Director’s Vision" highlights examples of acquisitions under the late director’s stewardship, as well as gifts given to the PMA in honor of d’Harnoncourt

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Apr. 26-July 5, 2009
Over 4,000 hand-painted paper leaves, each bearing the name of an American soldier killed in the Iraq War
Funding: Sheila Potiker

Museum of Arts and Design
Apr. 29-Sept. 20, 2009
68 objects spanning 30 years in the career of the experimental glass maker Klaus Moje, from early carved crystal glass pieces to his intricately patterned vessels of layered glass and his recent multi-panel fused works
Funding: Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, Bullseye Glass Company, Portland, Oregon, Susan Steinhauser and Daniel Greenberg, private donors

Baltimore Museum of Art
Apr. 29-June 28, 2009
Exhibiting the winners of the BMA’s inaugural round of "Baker Artist Awards" for Baltimore artists, featuring musician Carl Grubbs, sculptor John Ruppert and scroll-maker Hadieh Shafie (who each win $25,000), as well as "people’s choice" winners Becky Alprin, Milan Braslavsky, Sarah House, Adam Hopkins, Rob Levit, Jim Lucio and Vincent Thomas (who get $1,000 each)