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It is hard to define sculpture these days. Artists continue to make three-dimensional objects, but the range and variety of materials they employ defy classification. This is enchantingly evident in a show by the Armenian artist Karen Sargsyan at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Mr. Sargsyan, 36, makes figurative sculptures from cut paper. The works in the current show were created during his stay in Peekskill last fall as the center's artist in residence. Depending on how you look at it, the exhibition consists of either hundreds of individual cut paper sculptures arranged across the mezzanine gallery or a single installation made up of many parts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is paper passe? Your answer will most likely depend on whether you're reading this sentence on newsprint or on a screen. But it's safe to say that artists and designers aren't ready to quit the stuff, at least by the measure of the latest show at the Museum of Arts and Design. They are, however, willing to pierce, shred, carve and slice it. ''Slash: Paper Under the Knife,'' the third show in the museum's Materials and Process series, explores the sometimes violent, always intricate art of paper cutting. (It follows ''Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting'' and ''Pricked: Extreme Embroidery'' in 2007 and 2008.) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Folded paper transcends mere craft in the Parrish Art Museum's exhibition ''Paper Transformed -- Origami.'' Here is an astonishing array of lifelike animals made of nothing but folded paper. Some of them are life-size, like a heron, its neck crooked, greeting visitors at the entrance to the show. The nearly 100 sculptures on display here, by the world's leading contemporary origami artists, were made without cutting or gluing. According to the book that accompanies the exhibition, many of the pieces were made with a single sheet of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the exhibition "John Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956-1992" at the Cheim & Reid Gallery in New York City during June 15-16, 2007.

Reviews the art exhibition 'Works on Paper,' at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City.

Reviews the dance-theater piece `The Pink: A Paper Ritual of Eros,' directed by Muna Tseng.

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects 24 East 73rd Street, Second Floor, Manhattan [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By now it's no surprise to find a museum-worthy show of a major artist at a Chelsea gallery. The spoils of this season are such that a large trove of 1970s and '80s Lichtensteins arrived last month without much fanfare at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, overshadowed by another Gagosian coup -- Monet's late paintings -- a few blocks away. At the Lichtenstein exhibition it's harder to forget that you're in a place of business. The bulk of the more than 50 works in ''Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes'' comes from unnamed private collections, not museums, and some are for sale. The very idea of Lichtenstein, who died in 1997, as a studious genre painter may seem like a market-generated fiction; certainly the show is less inviting than the gallery's ''Roy Lichtenstein: Girls'' in 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The brevity of Ree Morton's art career had little to do with the usual reasons for the disappearance of talented women. Morton had married and started a family before she became a full-time artist in the late 1960s, taking just a decade to get up to speed with all the major ''isms.'' She had a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and an installation at the South Street Seaport and was the subject of an Artforum essay by the influential critic Lucy Lippard. Then in 1977 -- just shy of her 41st birthday -- Morton died in a car accident. Her death, coming not long after those of Eva Hesse in 1970 and Robert Smithson in 1973, dealt another cruel blow to postminimal sculpture. The art world recognized her achievements with a Morton retrospective at the New Museum in 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews a dance performance by Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci at the show "Performa 07," at various locations in New York City.

The article reviews a photography exhibition titled "Daniel Gordon: Thin Skin II," by Daniel Gordon at the Zach Feuer Gallery in New York City.

The article reviews a dance performance by the Wally Cardona Quartet at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York City.

The article reviews the play "The History of Valentyne and Orson," directed by Ralph Lee and performed by Ian Lassiter and Tom Marion at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights, New York City through Sunday.

The article reviews the dance performance "We Failed to Hold This Reality in Mind," by Hooman Sharifi at the Norway in New York Festival held in New York.

Reviews the art exhibition 'The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings From the Howard Gilman Collection,' on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through January 6, 2002.

Reviews the exhibition 'David to C é zanne: 19th Century French Drawings,' at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City until September 8, 2002.

Reviews the art exhibition `Master Drawings From the Smith College Museum of Art,' at the Frick Collection in New York City.

Reviews the architecture exhibition `Archigram 1961-74,' at the Thread Waxing Space, 476 Broadway, New York City, through April 13, 1998.

Reviews the live performance of a dance by Gina Bonati and Marcela Ortiz de Zarate, on March 17, 1995 at the Dia Center for the Arts.

The artist and poet Douglas Florian is best known for writing and illustrating award-winning children's books that are wittily educational, especially about animals. Working in gouache with collage, he depicts just about anything with an impressive combination of accuracy and improvisation and is similarly free with language. Mr. Florian, who always works on paper bags, has shown in art galleries since 1985, presenting work that is generally more abstract if no less playful than his illustrations. Here his excellent eye for color shines, and an organic multiculturalism is given full expression. Tantra, Elizabeth Murray, maps, free-range calligraphy, Marimekko handmade wrapping paper and Gerhard Richter all come to mind in this show of 33 small paintings, most done this year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THURSDAY night is gallery trolling night in Chelsea, so it was not surprising last week to find a crowd upstairs at the Max Lang gallery, examining the early works of the interior designer Scott Sanders. Under the proud eye of the curator, Shirley Sanders, the crowd examined drawings like ''Self-Portrait With Rosy Cheeks,'' a crayon on paper, from 1969, which showed a grinning little boy in dark glasses who looked eerily like the 47-year-old Mr. Sanders looks today; ''Colonial Home,'' a ballpoint pen on paper, from 1977; and ''Mega Mansion,'' a marker-pen drawing on paper, from 1975, of a great house set on a hilly landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews several art exhibitions in New York City including "Here Your Are," by artist Maya Bloch, "Electricity Fabric Paint Paper Vinyl," by Daniel Buren, and "The Matriarch's Rhapsody," by Jacolby Satterwhite.

The article reviews the exhibition "Romare Bearden: The Paper of Truth: Works From the Collection of Russell Goings and Evelyn Boulware" at the Upper West Side, New York City, running until December 8, 2012.

There are so many ways to talk about the cultural differences between the performance and visual art worlds (and curators seem at pains to do so, emphasizing which ''context'' an artist should be seen in, so we poor huddled masses might better direct our gazes). Comparing and contrasting the consumer mores of each world is one of the more enjoyable methods for framing the conversation. Which group tends to be titillated by nudity and which bored, for example, or which will spend lots of time to see something but not lots of money, and vice versa? When the French choreographer Marie Cool cycled through ''Untitled (Prayers) 1996-2007,'' her collaboration with the artist Fabio Balducci during Performa 07, the sizable crowd at the Clocktower Gallery hustled for the best viewing positions, getting as close to the action as possible. Audience members only gradually siphoned off as the repetitive, reductive evening wore on. (The diminutive Ms. Cool does not so much perform as mechanically enact whimsical little tasks: sliding pieces of paper together into peaks on a tabletop or deftly pushing white string into fluid patterns.) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the finale of ''Wintuk'' the audience disappears in a nor'easter of crepe-paper snowflakes. Until then, though, the wonderment of Cirque du Soleil's fourth (and final) holiday visit to the cavernous Theater at Madison Square Garden occurs despite, not because of, the seasonal trappings. The title of this family-friendly show refers to the ice kingdom that ultimately greets a wide-eyed boy, his wider-eyed female companion and a singing shaman in search of snow. Once there, a milquetoast clown in a trash can clangs around before taking on two ice giants; a hoop-twirling temptress brings a dog back to life; and a pair of baby storks turn out to be dancing pickpockets. Or maybe the dog gets resurrected after that. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you had $10,000 to burn, which choreographer would you choose to support? This is the premise of ''The A.W.A.R.D. Show!,'' though the title doesn't refer to the cash prize but is instead a rather torturous acronym: Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance. I'm not sure I know what that means, but it sounds ominous. Over three nights at the Joyce SoHo, 12 choreographers vie for audience votes, which are cast on little paper ballots; on the fourth night, the three finalists' works are performed again: the winner gets $10,000 and the runners-up $1,000 each. The other nine contestants, and their collaborators, walk away empty-handed. (It's an ugly downside to this contest, especially given that dancers and choreographers are rarely adequately compensated for their labor; even $10,000 quickly begins to seem like a small number when you do a realistic accounting of the hours and costs associated with making a piece.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

''Here Rests Peggy,'' a new work by Ivy Baldwin Dance, was drawn from several disparate sources: German Expressionist film, Peggy Guggenheim's extravagant life and art collection, and, as the news release puts it, ''the constant crashing of the Ligurian Sea,'' which Ms. Baldwin encountered during a research fellowship in Bogliasco, Italy. On paper this is a rich, tantalizing mix. But ''Here Rests Peggy,'' which had its premiere on Wednesday night at the Chocolate Factory, only very intermittently hinted at the grandness that helped inspire it. Most of the hourlong dance cultivated a sly, arch demeanor, affecting a slick cleverness that didn't quite pass for humor or style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exhibition of Haitian painting, sculpture and works on paper -- including Salnave Philippe-Auguste's ''Birds and Flowers,'' a detail of which is shown above -- will be on view at Affirmation Arts at 523 West 37th Street in Manhattan from Oct. 1 to Nov. 24, the gallery said on Tuesday. The exhibition, ''Saving Grace: A Celebration of Haitian Art,'' is being organized by a historian of Haitian art, Gerald Alexis, and will feature works from the Nader Gallery in Port-au-Prince, as well as others being lent by artists and private collectors in Haiti, Canada and the United States. Many of the best-known artists of the Haitian Renaissance, including Hector Hyppolite, Celestin Faustin, Wilson Bigaud and Prefete Duffaut, will be represented. The Nader Gallery survived the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January, but a private museum owned by the same family, and which housed some 12,000 works of art, was destroyed. Two paintings included in the exhibition, Hyppolite's ''Pot de Fleurs'' and Faustin's ''Beau Reve,'' were pulled from the wreckage and restored by art conservators working in a lab set up in Port-au-Prince by the Smithsonian Institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just a few small tweaks, and Jack Johnson's show at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night would have been perfect. First, the time of day -- his songs are meant for lazy beach afternoons. Hearing them after sunset feels disorienting. Second, the location: the Garden, it's just so claustrophobic, so air-conditioned, so indoors. Let those breezy rhythms breathe. Third, the crowd: let's lose about 17,000 or so of those people, swaying arrhythmically to Mr. Johnson's songs, light as tissue paper. Finally, someone, please turn the music down, if it would indeed be possible to be any softer, any quieter than it was at this show, perhaps the most gentle in Madison Square Garden history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anselm Kiefer, ''Sommer in Barjac -- Die beruhmten Orden der Nacht'' 2010, gouache on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Translation of text on the work: ''Summer in Barjac -- the renowned orders of the night.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thanks to El Museo del Barrio the artist Rafael Ferrer, at 77, is finally having his moment. ''Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer,'' his first large museum survey, spans more than five decades, with nearly 200 works in just about every late-20th-century medium except film and video. The show has an immediate allure thanks to Mr. Ferrer's instinctive facility for color and materials of all kinds. The general impression is of someone who would figure out how to make art if confined to a nearly empty room. Calabash gourds appear in several sculptures. Paper bags -- a preferred drawing surface for decades -- have occasioned an exploration of the human face as mask that is almost encyclopedic in its cultural and emotional allusions. Small, wood-framed slate tablets provide an ideal surface for a series of appropriately grisaille paintings from 2005 and 2006. At El Museo enormous groupings of these works face each other across a gallery, to electrifying effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This show pairs small-scale work, mostly on paper, by two Argentine artists little seen in New York. Each grew up in Buenos Aires during years of civic trauma; each has packed responses to a deadly era into the art. Margarita Paksa graduated from art school in 1955 and participated in the pro-democracy protests that brought down the rule of Juan Peron that year. A core member of the art world vanguard, she experimented, critically, with variations on Minimalism, Conceptual art and performance, and with sexual and topical content that led to police censorship and a brief imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alexander Calder and Yves Tanguy -- old friends, drinking buddies and Connecticut neighbors -- are together again. Or rather, their art is, in a delightful, immersive exercise in mutual illumination at L&M Arts on the Upper East Side. Surprisingly, this has never happened before. The L&M exhibition, ''Tanguy/Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction,'' brings together 46 works from 1934 to 1956. There are 25 sculptures by Calder, including marvelously ethereal, levitating stabiles and mobiles; some of the wood-and-wire constellations; and three uncharacteristic bronze sculptures. Quite a few of these might almost have walked out of one or more of the 19 paintings and works on paper by Tanguy, some of which even include startlingly Calderesque wire structures, and nearly all of which depict oddly shaped, water-worn stones in amalgams that suggest human involvement, albeit long past. Stonehenge for pebble lovers. These formations, in varying densities, occupy vast plains that recede in increasingly atmospheric, horizon-free gradations of land, mist and sky. The colors often have a warm sunset glow -- if not a lurid afterglow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What do you do with the detritus of your dead? All those hauntingly, definitively empty clothes; the papers that fill box after box; the books and the knickknacks; the forbidding, uninhabited furniture. The performance artist Cynthia Hopkins has provided her own solution for this emotionally fraught storage problem: she wears what her father left behind. It has become her theatrical costume. Ms. Hopkins makes her entrance as a geisha-faced clown in ''The Truth: A Tragedy,'' the angry ritual of grief that she is performing at the SoHo Rep, clad in cumbersome layers that disguise her body and distort her movements. Her skirt is made of neckties. She has several caps on her head. And all sorts of things lurk beneath her outer garments, including a small bell, a Japanese kimono, a limp carrot and a long necklace of eyeglasses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Navigating the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be bewildering -- there is so much great stuff to see in every direction that you can feel rudderless. So it helps to have a plan. Here is a good one: Oberlin College's Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio, under renovation, has sent 19 of its best paintings and one sculpture to New York, where they are in permanent collection galleries along with the works they relate to at the Met. This may not sound like much on paper, but it makes for a rewarding scavenger hunt. The exhibition, ''Side by Side: Oberlin's Masterworks at the Met,'' was organized by Maryan Ainsworth, curator of European paintings at the Met, and Andria Derstine, curator of European and American art at the Allen, and Stephanie Wiles, the Allen's director. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cutting, shredding, slashing and burning are usually processes associated with destruction. But on Saturday the Museum of Arts and Design will show children 5 and older how all that clipping and ripping can also play a role in creation. That's the message of Mad Family Day, which will center on the exhibition ''Slash: Paper Under the Knife.'' While the museum offers children's workshops in its Studio Sunday series (this week the theme is pop-up cards), Saturday will be its first family day since it relocated to Columbus Circle. The idea is: Hey kids, meet the new kid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To attend an Andrea Marcovicci cabaret show is to participate in a communal rite in which it is tacitly understood -- at least during the duration of the performance -- that nothing today can match the magic and romance of old Hollywood and Broadway. An audience of a certain age agrees to gorge retrospectively on the illusions of youth from an era long before the proliferation of viral gossip and reality television. As the ceremonial priestess, Ms. Marcovicci plays a grand, smiling Hollywood hostess -- a Loretta Young-like figure -- throwing open doors to a rose-colored mythology. Her new show, ''Skylark: Marcovicci Sings Mercer,'' at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, a tribute to the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who would have turned 100 on Nov. 18 (Ms. Marcovicci turned 61 the same day), should perpetuate her reign as the queen of high-class cabaret nostalgia. At the opening-night show last week, Ms. Marcovicci, who is celebrating her 23rd year at the Oak Room, once again worked her wiles as a show-business medium channeling Olympian spirits. Mercer may have had a drinking problem -- when in his cups, she said, he once told Irving Berlin that he ''couldn't write his way out of a paper bag'' -- but it was a minor quirk in her otherwise hagiographic account of his life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THINK of the artist Paul McCarthy, and it's hard not to imagine him the way he has appeared in countless videos and performances through the years -- stuffing a bunch of mayonnaise-and-ketchup-slathered hot dogs in his mouth, as he did, say, in ''Hot Dog'' (1974), or wearing a clown's nose and muttering maniacally while sloshing paint on canvas (''Painter,'' 1995), or running amok with a gang of elves in a filthy, chocolate-smeared Santa suit (''Santa Chocolate Shop,'' 1996-97). Or else doing other things in projects over the years -- things involving Barbie dolls, sausages, Vaseline and his own and other people's bodily orifices -- that cannot be described here. But during a recent interview at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York, the day before the opening of his new show of works on paper there, ''White Snow'' (through Dec. 24), Mr. McCarthy presented a strikingly different persona. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AUSTe Paintings and Works on Paper [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The hijab, or Muslim head scarf, is supposed to deflect attention. So what should we make of the model wearing a leopard-print version and an eye patch? She's the creation of Princess Hijab, an anonymous Parisian street artist, who adorns women in advertisements with impromptu black-marker ''veils'' and papers public spaces with her own hipsterish ''Hijab Ads.'' The princess is the Shepard Fairey of the French Muslim world or maybe the Naomi Klein. Is she a ''hijabist''? Or even a Muslim? We don't know. But you can see some of her work in ''The Seen and the Hidden: [Dis]covering the Veil,'' at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Midtown Manhattan. The exhibition, which includes artists from Europe and the Middle East as well as American artists of diverse backgrounds, reminds New Yorkers that debates about the veil are heating up in many communities overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Let's get one thing straight: John Currin can draw, but he's no draftsman. His material attraction to paint -- whether in the glowing flesh of his Cranach-inspired nudes or the crude impasto complexions of more modern subjects -- is undeniable. And life drawing has a limited role in his practice, despite his oft-professed interest in the old masters and his self-consciousness about being a figurative painter. So a certain degree of skepticism may accompany a visit to ''John Currin: Works on Paper -- A Fifteen Year Survey of Women,'' at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. What can these 77 drawings, most from the 1990s, tell us about this much-dissected artist or his way of seeing the world that we don't already know, in richer and more compelling detail, from his paintings? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''Drawing Friends: Hedda Sterne Portraits on Paper'' at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center is one of the simpler, more endearing exhibitions on Long Island at the moment. Encompassing two dozen of the artist's small intimate drawings of herself and her family and friends, this show, organized by Patterson Sims, a guest curator, makes for light, easy viewing. It is also nicely installed, with the works arrayed on the walls of the living room and parlor suggesting the faces of guests at a dinner party. Mr. Sims has concentrated his selection on depictions of artists and critics associated with the Abstract Expressionist circle or members of eastern Long Island's arts community. The marquee names included the artists Vita Petersen, Joan Mitchell and Elaine de Kooning, as well as the critics Dore Ashton, Phyllis Braff and Harold Rosenberg. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sometimes it takes a family, and a persistent one at that. So it was with Mayer Kirshenblatt, a reluctant painter and accidental memoirist whose words and images form an extraordinary exhibition at the Jewish Museum. ''They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust'' contains nearly 70 canvases and a dozen works on paper. Nearly all depict scenes of Jewish (and some gentile) life in between-the-wars Poland with a charming combination of poignancy and precision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the young French soldier Louis Althusser was taken prisoner of war by the Nazis in 1940, he tossed scraps of paper out of the train that was carrying him away, asking whoever found them to send them to his uncle in Paris. ''The last word from French soil,'' reads one. ''The train that shakes my handwriting is still rolling, and I believe that we are headed for Germany.'' So they were, and Althusser, who would later become one of France's most renowned Marxists, spent the entire war in a prison camp. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''Haggadah (or the Passover Show),'' Witness Relocation's new production at La MaMa E.T.C., stands as a noisy rebuke to that too-familiar creature: the interminable family Seder. A whirl of speedy activity, with projections, music, dancing and short skits, ''Haggadah,'' directed and choreographed by the troupe's leader, Dan Safer, is theater for the short-attention-span, when-do-we-eat? crowd. Conceived collaboratively -- the program calls the eight performers co-creators and co-choreographers -- the show is more a series of riffs than a retelling of the Passover story, in which Moses leads the Jews out of captivity in Egypt. There's a hit-or-miss quality to those riffs, which run from silly (Moses, encouraged to have a jelly bean, opens a can and a paper snake pops out) to sober (a Holocaust-like story about a hut full of dead bodies). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HAVING spent too much time idling in hotel rooms, Christina Kruse, the hauntingly beautiful German model, decided in the mid-'90s to take up a hobby. So she bought a Mamiya camera and became her own guinea pig, dressing up as different characters and posing for herself. Then she began gluing the photos into travel journals (or ''Reisebuchs,'' as she calls them) and creating intricate collages that elegantly combined gouache and newsprint, colored tape and metallic paper. ''They became like a language I had with myself,'' she said. Nowadays, Ms. Kruse has a studio in Brooklyn and a costume closet the size of a small bedroom. Her photos have been published in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Interview; and last week, her first solo show in the United States opened at Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. On view is a range of evocative, often amusing self-portraits and collages, as well as ''Reisebuch 1-5,'' her limited-edition artist's book, painstakingly self-published in Germany. So much for free time. As she noted, ''It took forever to do them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jasper Johns is a famously reticent artist. So it may strike some visitors to the Museum of Modern Art as comical when they read his words quoted in a wall label next to his 1985 painting ''Summer'': ''In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.'' Funny that Mr. Johns would view his later work, which is not much less enigmatic than his early work, as unreserved. The quotation appears in ''Focus: Jasper Johns,'' an exhibition of 87 paintings, drawings and prints from the permanent collection organized by Deborah Wye, the museum's chief curator of prints and illustrated books. The show focuses on a handful of motifs that Mr. Johns has recycled over the years, including the target, the numbers, the flag, the can of brushes and the so-called crosshatchings. Ranging in time from his first painting of the American flag in 1954-55 to a recently acquired series of works on paper from 2001, it would make an excellent introduction for anyone just getting to know Mr. Johns's work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]