Whitney Museum of American Art
Sept. 4-Nov. 28, 2010
Photos made solely while in a car, driving across the U.S., juxtaposing the auto interior with roadside scenes framed by the windshield, side windows and rear-view mirrors
Curator: Elisabeth Sussman
Catalogue: The show accompanies a book published by D.A.P./Fraenkel
Also on view: "Sara VanDerBeek: To Think of Time," Sept. 17-Dec. 15, 2010

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sept. 4, 2010-May 30, 2011
Looking at the celebrated French realist Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) and his vision of living in harmony with nature, in terms of his draftsmanship, technical skills and sense of color, which anticipated Impressionism, via 46 pastels, drawings, watercolors, etchings and a woodcut, all from the museum collection
Curator: Helen Burnham
Funding: Cordover Exhibition Fund

Asia Society Museum
Sept. 9, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
The first New York museum show of the Japanese Neo-Pop artist (b. 1959) -- with a title selected by the artist himself from a song by Dan Penn -- boasts more than 100 works divided into three sections (isolation, rebellion, music) plus a new commissioned installation done in collaboration with Hideki Toyoshima, a member of the Japanese design collective graf
Curators: Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka
Catalogue: Abrams, 272 pp., $60
Funding: W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, Mori Building Co., others

Santa Monica Museum of Art
Sept. 11-Dec. 18, 2010
Thirty-five works dating from 1951-1990 by the Italian artist (1915-1995) celebrated for abstractions using burlap, earth, burnt plastic and other natural materials, who first came to the U.S. as a prisoner of war in 1944 and later bought a house in the Hollywood Hills
Curator: Lisa Melandri, with Michael Duncan
Catalogue: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 64 pp.
Funding: Warhol Foundation, Isabella del Frate Rayburn and Maurice Kanbar, Randi Malkin Steinberger and Harlan Steinberger, others.
Also on view: "Libro/Oggetto: Italian Artists’ Books, 1960s-Now"

Neuberger Museum of Art
Sept. 11-Dec. 19, 2010
On the occasion of the artist’s 80th birthday, a comprehensive survey of Ringgold’s pioneering paintings exploring "the intersections of race, gender and class" in response to 1960s social movements
Curators: Thom Collins, Tracy Fitzpatrick
Catalogue: yes
Funding: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney
Also on view: "Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line"

Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 15, 2010-Mar. 14, 2011
The kitchen as threshold of modern culture, via an ergonomic, mass-produced kitchen designed in 1926-27 by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky for public housing around Frankfurt, plus a variety of other items from MoMA’s collection
Curator: Juliet Kinchin, Aidan O’Connor
Catalogue: The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, 512 pp., $65
Funding: Silestone Quartz Surfaces

Neue Galerie New York
Sept. 16, 2010-Jan. 10, 2011
The first major U.S. museum show devoted to Messerschmidt (1736-1783), who after a breakdown in the early 1770s began making his "character heads" as a way, he said, to protect himself from evil spirits
Curator: Guilhem Scherf
Catalogue: Officina Libraria
Tour: Louvre, opening January 2011

Art Institute of Chicago
Sept. 16, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
Seventeen pre-Columbian artworks from Mexican museums on loan as part of "Mexico 2010," a citywide celebration of the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence from Spain and the Centennial of the Revolution of 1910
Catalogue: 40 pp.
Funding: Gilchrist Foundation, others
Also on view: "Jitish Kallat: Public Notice 3," Sept. 11, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011; "Lewis Baltz: Prototypes / Ronde de Nuit," Sept. 25, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011; and "Gray Collection: Seven Centuries of Art," Sept. 25, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011

Cincinnati Art Museum
Sept. 18, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
Focusing on the notions of modernity and femininity in Georgian England via 16 paintings, including the museum’s own portrait of Ann Ford, restored for the occasion
Curator: Benedict Leca
Tour: San Diego Museum of Art

National Gallery of Art
Sept. 19, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011
Sixteen composite heads by the Renaissance master of physiognomic fantasias, plus drawings by Leonardo and Dürer, bronzes, ceramics and manuscripts to provide context
Tour: Palazzo Real, Milan, Jan. 27-May 8, 2011
Funding: Louisa and Robert Duemling, Altria Group, others

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Sept. 19, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011
Sophisticated brass, terra-cotta and stone sculptures -- 100 in all -- ranging in date from the ninth to the 15th centuries, in a show organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments
Curator: Enid Schildkrout
Catalogue: University of Washington Press, 200 pp., $40
Tour: Virginia MFA, Feb. 12-May 22, 2011; Indianapolis Museum of Art, July 8-Oct. 9, 2011; Museum for African Art, Nov. 11, 2011-Mar. 4, 2012

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Sept. 19, 2010-Jan. 24, 2011
More than 250 works, presented in two segments, the first at the Geffen Contemporary, and then at MOCA Grand Avenue, where it opens Oct. 31, 2010
Curator: Rebecca Morse, in collaboration with a curatorial team including Jeffrey Deitch, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Alma Ruiz and Bennett Simpson
Funding: Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment, Mandy and Cliff Einstein, Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation, BCBG Max Azria Group

Morgan Library & Museum
Sept. 24, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
Over 45 large, highly finished drawings made during the height of the Pop Art movement, never before exhibited as a group
Tour: Albertina, Vienna, Feb. 4-May 15, 2011
Funding: Terra Foundation for American Art, others

Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Sept. 24, 2010-Jan. 30, 2011
Celebrating the gift by collectors Fleur and Charles Bresler of 66 contemporary artworks made of turned and carved wood, with nearly half of the group going on public view for the first time, and including objects by David Ellsworth, William Hunter, Mark and Melvin Lindquist, Edward Moulthrop and Rude Osolnik, among others
Curator: Nicholas R. Bell
Catalogue: 152 pp., $45

M.H. de Young Museum
Sept. 24, 2010-Jan. 18, 2011
Part two of an impressive collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay (part one was Impressionist paintings, and went on view this spring) boasts 120 masterworks, on loan while the Paris museum is refurbished in advance of its 25th anniversary in 2011
Catalogue: A boxed set of hardcover catalogues for both exhibitions is $100
Tour: The exhibition appeared at the National Art Center, Tokyo, May 26-Aug. 16, 2010
Funding: Bank of America, Jeannik Mequet Littlefield, Bernard Osher Foundation, Koret Foundation

Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Sept. 24, 2010-Jan. 16, 2011
The regional art show goes international -- with local artists exhibiting side-by-side with Kai Althoff, Andy Goldsworthy, Lorraine O’Grady, Alec Soth, Do Ho Suh and other international art stars -- in this ambitious collaborative exhibition, which takes place at Hallwalls, CEPA Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center and another half-dozen or so alternative and university spaces as well as at the Albright-Knox
Curator: John Massier (project director)
Funding: Empire State Development Corporation, John R. Oishei Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo

Hammer Museum
Sept. 25, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
A group of 19 semi-representational paintings made when the Minimalist sculptor was only 24 years old, which have been viewed as "abject exercises of self-deprecation" but are here seen as "testimonies to a private anxiety"
Curator: E. Luanne McKinnon
Funding: FUNd Endowment, Julius Rolshoven Memorial Fund, others

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sept. 25, 2010-June 19, 2011
More than 100 garments by the American designer Arnold Scaasi, including outfits made for Barbra Streisand, Mamie Eisenhower, Elisabeth Taylor and Gayfrid Steinberg, celebrating the museum’s acquisition of his archive and a collection of his designs
Funding: David and Roberta Logie Fund

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Sept. 25, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
Paintings, sculptures and installations from the 1970s to the present, in a survey of the Fort Worth artist Vernon Fisher (b. 1943), whose work marries the legacies of Pop and Conceptual art within a vernacular American narrative
Curator: Michael Auping
Catalogue: University of Texas Press

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sept. 28, 2010-Jan. 2, 2011
Over 200 works in all mediums, drawn largely from Chinese collections, exploring the period 1215-1368, when China was unified under the Yuan Dynasty and ruled, along with Persia, Southern Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, by the Mongol empire
Curator: James C.Y. Wyatt
Catalogue: 384 pp., $65
Funding: Bank of America, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, others
Also on view: "The Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel"