San Jose Museum of Art
Aug. 1, 2009-Dec. 13, 2009
Mobiles, jewelry and works on paper drawn from Bay Area collections

Hammer Museum, UCLA
Aug. 1-Oct. 25, 2009
New sculptures and two new photographic lightbox wall reliefs, alongside a selection of photographs taken since 2001, by the L.A.-based artist known for works that explore light, energy and time
Funding: Susan Bay-Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, others

Museum of Modern Art
Aug. 2, 2009-Oct. 19, 2009
Exhibition of the superdesigner Ron Arad’s innovative art furniture
Curator: Marie-Laure Jousset
Catalogue: 216 pp., $45
Tour: This show has already appeared at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; it continues to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Funding: Notify, Contemporary Arts Council of the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Arts and Design
Aug. 5-Aug. 30, 2009
The three winners of a $200,000 art prize sponsored by a Dubai-based private equity group, designed to raise international awareness of artists from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia: Iran’s Nazgol Ansarinia, Algeria’s Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Turkey’s Kutlug Ataman
Curators: Leyla Fakhr, Carol Solomon, Cristiana Perrella
Funding: Abraaj Capital

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Aug. 6, 2009-Feb. 21, 2010
50 examples of Chinese carved lacquer works, from the Met collection and the collection of Florence and Herbert Irving
Curator: Denise Patry Leidy

Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Aug. 6, 2009-Jan. 24, 2010
Selections from the LACMA design collection, including works by Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Gehry, Johanna Grawunder, Michael Graves, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Alvin Lustig, Greg Lynn, Elena Manferdini, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Ettore Sottsass and Frank Lloyd Wright
Curator: Bobbye Tigerman

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Aug. 7, 2009-Jan. 17, 2010
15 examples of artists’ books that blur the lines between book and sculpture, by artists Elisabetta Gut, Wendy Fernstrom, Brenda Watson, others
Curator: Krystyna Wasserman
Catalogue: The Book as Art: Artists’ Books from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 208 pp., $55
Funding: Margaret M. Johnston

Price Tower Arts Center , Bartlesville, Okla.
Aug. 7, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
Focusing on the resurgence of handcrafted objects, via 75 objects by British and Oklahoman designers (hence the title "UK/OK")
Curator: Scott W. Perkins
Funding: ConocoPhillips, KJRH Channel 2, Bank of Oklahoma, others

High Museum of Art
Aug. 8, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
Photos by Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, commissioned as part of the High’s "Picturing the South"initiative which has famous and emerging photographers respond to the American Southeast

Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Aug. 8, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010
Organized to coincide with a loan of Vermeer’s The Astronomer from the Musée du Louvre in Paris (on view from Oct. 18), this show explores "the scientific and cultural world of the 17th-century astronomer" via prints, books, scientific instruments and exhibits of other objects depicted in the painting

UBS Art Gallery
Aug. 13-Oct. 27, 2009
Full retrospective of New York school painter Jack Tworkov (1900-1982), ranging from his Social Realist paintings and drawings of the 1930s and 1940s to Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1950s and 1960s and finally to the geometrical paintings of the 1970s and early 1980s
Curator: Jason Andrew
Funding: UBS Art Gallery

Norton Simon Museum
Aug. 14, 2009-Mar. 8, 2010
An "intimate" exhibition of paintings, sculptures and ceremonial ritual objects, exploring the sinister and monstrous side of Buddhist deities
Curator: Christine Knoke

Rubin Museum of Art
Aug. 14, 2009-Jan. 11, 2010
Exploring the symbolism of the mandala (with special attention paid to the mystical import of the number five), via paintings, three-dimensional works, portable mandalas, ritual objects and even newly created "virtual mandalas"

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Aug. 14-Nov. 1, 2009
A site-specific environment exploring the "life cycle of luxury goods" by the Houston-born, Brooklyn-based Villegas

Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pa.
Aug. 15, 2009-Jan. 3, 2010
A retrospective of work by Philadelphia-born R.A.D. Miller (1905-1966), known for subtly modernist Bucks County landscape paintings
Curator: Cher Krause Knight
Catalogue: 64 pp.
Funding: Mary Lou and Andrew Abruzzese of the Pineville Tavern

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Aug. 15-Nov. 29, 2009
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Duchamp’s famous installation at the PMA, via 80 works related to its instalation, all the known studies, photographs, "erotic objects" and other materials
Curator: Michael R. Taylor

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Aug. 16, 2009-Feb. 21, 2010
Recently acquired design art works by Gae Aulenti, Mathias Bengtsson, Shiro Kuramata, Gerrit Rietveld, Wieki Somers, Ettore Sottsass, others

Menil Collection
Aug. 21, 2009-Feb. 28, 2010
Works from the Menil collection that involve the fragmented body, from a 15th-century finger reliquary to Cubist and Surrealist works

Art Institute of Chicago
Aug. 21-Nov. 15, 2009
An "abstracted narrative of guilt, mourning and loss, rooted in specific geopolitical, historical, and autobiographical facts," by Ugandan art filmmaker Zarina Bhimji

Dallas Museum of Art
Aug. 30, 2009-Feb. 28, 2010
Ca. 100 works spanning 5,000 years, from Pietro Paolini’s Bacchic Concert and Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust’s Oedipus at Colonus, to Pablo Picasso’s The Guitarist and Romare Bearden’s Soul Three, all on the theme of performance
Curators: organized collaboratively with all of the DMA’s curators