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Remember Minimalism’s hard, industrial edge? For fifty-five years, Sheila Hicks has dedicated herself to one thing, with work of such clarity that one can take it in at a glance. After that, though, things grow complicated, and the more one tries to describe it, the more one has to qualify and to explain. Start with that one thing, weaving. She weaves everything, from materials as simple as linen and as natural as corn husks. They just may not cover anything.

They may not be able to cover anything, in loose threads barely sufficient to hold other bits together. They may look like an uncovering, like a head of hair—or the thick nap of a comforter without anything to hold it together or to hold it in. They may wind together into something tough and harsh, or that dark hair may consist of something as hard as steel filaments amid lighter linen and cotton. Menhir, completed in 2004, almost sounds like “my hair,” even while meaning ancient monuments from the Atlantic coast to either side of the Channel. Hard, soft, or both at once, one can practically feel it.

She studied at Yale with George Kubler, a scholar of pre-Columbian art and art after the Spanish conquest. She is in the design collection of the Cooper-Hewitt and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris. If she has one constant, though, it is tapestry way too small for blankets even for a child. It may come as a surprise to find one such from 1958, at Sikkema Jenkins through May 25. A 2011 retrospective came no closer than the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Philadelphia, even though “women’s work” is hot again—but this touches most of those years, with no obvious arc or development. And it is clearly art, except when it is not.

The Met counted her in 2006 among the American Studio Craft Movement, but she has lived since 1964 in Paris. The coarse rope of Overflow from that year spills to the floor from an even coarser washtub, as in a postwar cold-water flat. An old-fashioned key with fat, colorful rubber bands hanging down could allow entrance. She intended her most clearly decorative art, a bas relief as the bottom half of an oval, for an Air France Boeing 747. Then again, Frank Stella was busy at his Protractors in 1969, too. Not that he would have assembled one from rectangles of varying sizes in no particular order.

She also studied with Josef Albers, known for his Homage to the Square, although one can forget that he had taught design at the Bauhaus. Still, Hicks is not making pure painting or pure anything else. Even her 1973 Masonry, a precise grid of squares, uses its diagonal weave to break sharply with the picture plane. It matters that a 1978 white column extends to the ceiling just inches from an actual gallery column of more or less the same dimensions. It matters, too, though that hers never quite touches the ground, as if floating, and that she assembles it from cotton bands with strings at each corner—maybe diapers or hospital supplies.

She accepts imagery, architecture, and geometry, like the bathtub or column, so long as she can flirt with them all. Her 1974 wool Tapis de Prière (or “prayer rug”) looks like the silhouette of a minaret. She uses both natural and found materials, while making it hard to tell them apart. The rope in the bathtub is seagrass, and what look like black shells caught up in thread are slate. Hicks makes art about design and craft, as if weaving Minimalism, but works often as not have loose craft and banal design. Somehow, the materials are enough.

First the bad news. For a long time after Abstract Expressionism, it was a bit harder to get taken seriously without working large. On the good side, one could do it without literally making history. One did not have to repaint Guernica, Diego Rivera and the Mexican revolution, or (heaven forbid) Thomas Hart Benton. One could stick to geometry and impulse. One could stick to what one knew.

How about, though, painting what one saw? Even if one accepts Pop Art as just that, it took longer to map one’s environment. Maybe it took getting over suburban sprawl, but it has started to happen big time. The impulse underlies urban graffiti art, the imaginary architecture of Sarah Sze or Julie Mehretu, and the real landscapes of Tacita Dean. Each of the artists in “Inside Outside, Outside In,” Lesley Heller through May 25, has something in common with all three. The scenes all look familiar, in plain ink and washes, but they move within what Olafur Eliasson once called Your Negotiable Panorama.

Negotiating can mean either dealing with another person or navigating a space. Dawn Clements obliged a viewer to do both, when she drew the huge black namesake of the Boiler at Pierogi on facing walls (and she slipped back this very month as part of yet another competitor to yet another set of New York art fairs). Now she suggests something more intimate, as close and reassuring as a kitchen table by Janet Fish. She calls it Jessica Drummond’s Bedroom Wall (My Reputation, 1945), and a bedroom can hold all sorts of reputations. Actually, the subtitle names a 1946 film, with Drummond played by Barbara Stanwyck. Apparently, she can take a cue from nature in telling stories and a cue from stories while at home.

All four artists draw what they see, but their stories come with footnotes. Each of Theresa Ganz’s brown wreaths consists of cut photographs, but the warmth is real. So, for that matter, is the winter dryness. The other two artists create meticulous panoramas, but their urban planning, too, is deceptive. They cut and paste fragments of the outdoors. Assembly and disassembly definitely required.

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht displays what look like taped architectural photographs, but with drawings and actual tape. Fran Siegel riddles her cyan ink washes with gaps and tears. His schools and playgrounds stand empty. Highways cross her cities seen from above. Both extend the gallery interior to a chilly ideal. Maybe this is as close as Orchard Street comes to nature or to terror.

One has a real interior to cross on the way in, and Jade Townsend makes it a challenge. For a first obstacle or partition, one faces a large wrapped canvas, supported by legs lacking a head or torso. Then come a van and a small chamber lacking its Sheetrock—the whole surrounded by thick red verticals, somewhere between gestural brushwork and studs. Oh, and the walls hold pretend antique cartoons featuring circus performers and other controlling forces. All this has something to do with “Leviathan,” somehow identified with everyone’s favorite Great White Whale. I doubt it makes much sense, but if this is what happens with an art mover as an installation’s prime mover, so be it.

Even a museum needs a break now and then. “Shift,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem through May 27, feels less like an exhibition than spring break, and its “Projects | Perspectives | Directions” feel left over from something larger. And mostly they are, but the others on display are just hanging out as well. If the seven “autonomous projects” are not all projects or autonomous, fine. If the one project not formally part of the exhibition fits quite well, cut them a break there, too. It does, after all, represent a collaboration with a space alien.

No doubt the artists deserve a break. Nayland Blake has been giving the appearance of innocence a mean streak for a long time now. He finds funny, sadistic, and sexual undercurrents in childhood toys that would do Freud’s dreams proud, from a makeshift noose at the end of a sock to full-scale bunny suits. Here, though, the sketches in The Grind are just that, sketches, and he seems not so much to be thinking aloud as not thinking aloud. Jacolby Satterwhite has a more contemporary style of play, like a video game for the artist alone. He models his digital environment, somewhere between a disco and a playground, after his mother’s drawings, before inserting himself multiple times dancing. He means Country Ball 1989–2012 as an exploration of black motherhood, madness, and his own gay sexual identity, but it has a hard time carrying that weight.

The museum, too, deserves a break. It has kept discovering artists and giving them space to work—or, in the case of a video this winter by Rodney McMillian tearing apart a futon, a place never to rest. It has reached out to a remarkable number of artists, as part of the Bearden centennial, and the side room still has a stripped-down version of “The Bearden Project.” While the remaining tributes to Bearden are nice enough, like a blue abstraction by Demetrius Oliver no doubt related to his optical distortions, they also seem less relevant now to Romare Bearden. Another “project,” selections from the permanent collection hung salon style on just part of one wall, could have turned up anywhere. At most it has a slightly more contemporary slant, even with a big piece by Norman Lewis, than the collection in its usual place downstairs.

Lorraine O’Grady’s Sisters is cut down, too—a selection of four diptychs from her 1994 Miscegenated Family Album, which pairs photos of ancient Egyptian sculpture with portrait photography. Maybe I am just imagining it, but even the change of name goes with its piety, as labored as her pairing of Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. As for the space alien, he looks not so much silent as lost. Ralph Lemon met up with Walter Carter in Mississippi, at nearly one hundred, and made him the star of a video—walking a long road in an improvised space suit and dancing slowly with wife. I would like to say that it makes more sense than it does, and I would like to say that the accompanying photos look less like mere documentation of the video, but afraid not.

John Outterbridge can at least claim a little autonomy. The Rag Factory is cut down only in the sense that it travels directly from citywide projects in LA. Colored rags form a pillar or partition, connected to facing walls by twisted black cloth. Draped over a small pool of white and color, it has the peace, fragility, and ambition of his self-portraits in hair. Something even more mysterious descends from floor to ceiling, two parts of a thin blue line that meet above eye level. One has to go upstairs to discover that they are audio cables, like the loops of black cables knotted against the wall. Jennie C. Jones, who was among the museum’s emerging artists in 2001, plays with Minimalism’s geometry and industrial materials, but with a personal touch as well associations with music that “The Bearden Project” might emulate.

A pedestal has silvery Song Containers, in brushed aluminum that also goes beyond Minimalism or music. Jones chooses the parts of obsolete media that held liner notes, accentuating the silence. The imitation album covers, paper inserts for cassette tape, and eight-track boxes come in pairs that make them spookier still. Yet the winter’s one surviving installation holds the starkest silence. Kira Lynn Harris’s The Block looks even better now, maybe because I have since seen Bearden’s original at the Met. Somehow, she picks up only his motifs, in chalk-like white, while giving the four black walls over to a more contemporary city and the night.

Note: I have simply added this as a postscript to the fuller review of “The Bearden Project” and Kira Lynn Harris. That way, you may even get to know what I am talking about.

When Exit Art moved to Tenth Avenue, in 2003, it seemed to speak for the future of art art on the edge. It had left Soho’s European shopping mall behind, to half a mile north of Chelsea. It had its largest and airiest space ever, enough for large work, a typically chaotic show, and even a café/bar counter. (Who expects a free drink at openings when the future is at stake?) It had the promise of walk-in crowds, but also a space apart, between entrances to the Lincoln Tunnel. And it called the occasion “The Reconstruction.”

It had also opened its last decade. The neighborhood keeps changing, with the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, maybe New York’s finest studio program, near the Port Authority. The promise of the High Line keeps edging north. A quirky group show at Exit Art mixing formalism and free association, “Geometric Days,” even included an artist from a gallery down the street. Still, as its final show proclaims, “Curatorial correctness has never carried much weight.” Its last day open to the public is May 19.

The occasion is the August 2011 death of its co-founder and co-curator, Jeanette Ingberman, from cancer at age fifty-nine (and I have already offered a brief biography and tribute, so I shall cut corners and go quickly). Forget Bushwick: the whole idea of an institution for alternative art is under pressure. It makes sense, then, that its final show gives simply a history. Exit Art may have already been looking to an end or a way out, with a 2011 history of alternative spaces, and now it adopts the same archival format of posters, display cases, and boxes. One could be leaning over to pore over something lost long ago.

I am not sure it offers the best way to remember, but one has to expect a try. Besides, alternative spaces can get a bit self-involved, which is part of their hope as well as part of the problem. Group shows could grow too large or not. Curatorial correctness may not have carried weight, but political correctness did. Something about not seeing real art rubs that in, and this one literally takes art with its gloves on. Still, one has to say what happened.

Of course, Ingberman was chief curator in the Bronx when she and Papo Colo opened Exit Art in 1982 in a Canal Street loft, and it soon reflected its surroundings with a focus on illegal immigrants. Invisibility, though, has all sorts of resonance when it comes to alternative art. The documents here have an actual photograph of the master of it, David Hammons, who appeared in the first show along with a railroad track, coal, and a John Coltrane record. Others receiving early exposure, have included Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, David Wojnarowicz, and Ida Applebroog. I have already listed more than exemplars of race and gender, too, at length.

Exit Art could have found a way out, but it might just become something else in the process. The New Museum still looks for a place between political art and theme park without Marcia Tucker. Here, at least, one can spot Roxy Paine with mahogany and clay instead of showy metal forests. I still want to cry out for alternatives, even ones with money, and not just a sprawl of self-curatorial protest and good intentions. Maybe Colo alone is not going to pull it off, though I wish him peace, health, and success in whatever is to come. Still, he calls this “Every Exit Is an Entrance,” and I hope not to New Jersey.

Note: I have added this to round out a postscript last year on Ingberman’s death, in a longer essay on Exit Art’s survival.

Is it time to give up on the Whitney Biennial? Some demanded it, right as it set to open, but guess what? In a very real sense, the 2012 Whitney Biennial already has—and it is the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. For added insight, I wrap into it a post about those demands and the “Brucennial” that first appeared in this space in an earlier form.

Oh, sure, the exhibition (this year’s through May 27) is not going away any time soon, and neither is the attention that drives it. On a Saturday around noon, the line out front snaked around the corner on Madison Avenue, and the basement restaurant, Untitled, drew a crowd as well. Can the Whitney still get people talking quite the same way, though? Is it out and out refusing to try? Rather than define the state of American art, it seems content to stir things up around the edges, with the sparest and, often as not, most cryptic selection ever. And not a bad thing, too—but first and last a word about those demands and a Biennial’s place in the scene.

People always come to a Biennial with questions. What is the state of American art, and is this it? Who will make the cut, and who will be left out? These questions get people upset, because they frame inclusions and exclusions in terms of institutional power, and Biennials can assert that power in one of two ways. They can claim to have it all, or they can stake a point of view. One of this year’s curators, the Whitney’s Elisabeth Sussman, sure had one in 1993, a stridently political Biennial that angered pretty much everyone.

Well, surprise. The 2012 Biennial is themeless, but she and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator, pick just fifty-one artists, many of them young. And that includes films by Charles Atlas, Frederick Wiseman, and the late Mike Kelley (to name just three) that a day’s visitor might never see. It includes surrendering most of the fourth floor to performances that may take weeks to change. It includes a performance up in the fifth-floor mezzanine by Georgia Sagri, consisting often as not of her refusal to show up at all, amid a virtual studio of pillows, doors, empty clothes, and museum reproductions. Red Krayola, a rock band from the 1960s that I somehow overlooked, show up mostly by Skype in front of an immense guest book, while Andrea Fraser contributes only an essay—in a display copy of the catalog that the guard must chide someone every minute or two for attempting to read.

This is maddening, but it is not altogether mad. Globalization is real, and Biennials have recognized it for ten years now. So is the recession, adding to the backlash against huge Biennials and a gradual downsizing in the last three, and so is the interest in performance. Together, they suggest a Biennial nurturing the edges of New York art, and often enough it delivers. For the first time in memory, one can leave provoked rather than overwhelmed. The show may lack a theme, but it does have a point of view, the kind that gets one thinking and arguing back—and you will just have to read the longer review to hear more about it.

When Joanna Malinowski hangs around with her dog or builds a bottle track out of fake bison tusks, is she really turning Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp into Native American rituals? Maybe not, and more power to her—and to a bare-bones Biennial. From Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side, one can start to see the children of modernity, and some of them may have a sense of craft and a sense of humor left. As it happens, the political themes of the 1993 Biennial look sillier than ever in retrospect, but its choice of artists looks a lot better. Several, like Atlas and Robert Gober, turn up this time, too. Could the same dynamic be happening again?

If most people know anything about Rembrandt, it is this. He was a true artist, the kind that expressed his genius in countless self-portraits—and who certified his genius in the patina of dark, heavy brushstrokes that makes him an old master. What, then, should one make of a self-portrait on loan at the Met, through May 20, from Kenwood House in London? Around 1664, nearing sixty, he seems to have done everything to lay himself on the line. He painted large, and he painted bright, from the light that floods his face and for once pierces every shadow on the wall behind him. He painted honestly, from his unsmiling face and baggy clothing to the tools of his trade in his spare hand, ready for use.

He almost fills the self-portrait, with elbows cocked to either side and his palette extending past him to his left. He needs a haircut, and he could stand to shave. His hair, his shirt, his ill-fitting cap, the tips of each brush, and a speck of light on his bulbous nose compete for the brightest shade of white even beyond the plain white wall. And there behind him, to his left, he inscribes the most obvious echo of his familiar brown backgrounds. He does it with an uncharacteristic geometry designed to reinforce and to regularize his bulky form. He has traced a large, perfect circle.

By this point you should be tallying up what I have got right and wrong, only they may blend together like shadows. The “age of Rembrandt” notwithstanding, others did not share his output of self-portraits, about a dozen a decade. Nor did they submerge their subject, a game of hide and seek he began early, as one can see in a small (and disappointing) concurrent show pairing him and Edgar Degas. Early Rembrandt self-portraits have a more uniform brightness and tighter brushstrokes, but also a clever, confident habit of peering back from within a blur. When brushwork did grow heavy, he also happened to fall from favor until the nineteenth century, when artists started to see mass and form as a matter of construction rather than mere drawing—from Romanticism to Impressionism and culminating in Paul Cézanne. The Frick told that story of changing tastes only recently, with a focus on perhaps the greatest Rembrandt self-portrait of all, from its permanent collection.

Nor is simply laying on the brown or the white a sign of genius. The Frick made that clear, in bringing out workshop portraits with way too much cheating. When a scholarly committee (wrongly, I think) challenges the attribution of The Polish Rider, also in the Frick, it points to a poorly drawn or positioned horse’s leg and to unclear perspective in the dark rocks. As for a sudden clarity, the loan to the Met shares much of its frankness with a 1660 self-portrait, hanging right beside it. One sees the same lighting from the left, isolating the beard stubble and increasingly wrinkled forehead. Someone looking for murk and foam should take comfort in that Kenwood entered England’s public heritage via the Guinness family.

After its brief visit to New York, the portrait will join other paintings on tour during restoration of Kenwood House. For now, the Met calls its display “Rembrandt at Work,” and one can study the purpose of all that brushwork, starting with the clothing. In the Met’s portrait, Rembrandt builds the folds with sculptural precision, while next to it he draws out the mottled colors of a fur collar or the intense red of a shirt front. One can also see how much has changed. In the Met’s portrait, from the cocked beret on down, an artist’s work clothes and glance half-aside announce his artiness. Just a few years later, the artist seems more impoverished, but somehow richer—and more unflinching.

He has survived bankruptcy, a factor one has trouble not reading into the weary majesty of the Frick’s self-portrait from around 1658. He has survived the death in 1663 of his companion, Hendrickje, whose 1660 portrait hangs nearby—and he faces the future without flinching, with the brushes and maul stick that might have helped with that perfect circle. Most call the circle a boast, referring to legend that Giotto proved his Renaissance genius by tracing one freehand, and Rembrandt painted a calligrapher attempting just that. Rembrandt’s self-portrait adds a second circle, however, with one cut off by the frame and the other by his body. His geometry is forever doubled and incomplete, and his palettes show not a sign of paint. Rembrandt died in 1669, still resisting closure, but beginnings and endings never come easily.

Note: I have added this as a postscript to a previous loan from London two years ago, including Rembrandt, as part of selections from the Dulwich Picture Gallery at the Frick.