Despite her long career creating innovative assemblages that respond to race and gender, Betye Saar has yet to have a major survey in her home state. This exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art helps rectify that, highlighting the progression between her sketchbooks, which she’s carried while traveling the world, and her completed art. This includes I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, involving an ironing board augmented with a British slave-ship diagram and white sheets marked with the letters “KKK.” The tableau of domestic objects evokes the intersection of slavery, women’s labor, and modern racism. lacma.org

The playfully strange works by Scandinavian duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset (together known as Elmgreen & Dragset) include the perpetually closed Prada store in Marfa and the 2016 Van Gogh’s Ear, which stood upright in a swimming pool at Rockefeller Center in New York. This presentation at the Nasher Sculpture Center will concentrate on their sculptural objects, and how they involve elements of the figurative tradition in their surreal narratives, which often invoke timely issues like the privatization of public space or gay rights. Expect curious sights like a sinking art gallery and idealized male bodies sculpted in silver, all reflecting a long-term relationship with humor to subvert the totems of the modern world. nashersculpturecenter.org

In 2017, Theaster Gates unveiled a twenty-foot-tall circular temple in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, with visitors entering to encounter a salvaged statue of Saint Laurence, known as the patron saint of libraries. This solo show will reflect the expansive aspects of his socially engaged practice, which ranges from rehabilitating libraries and other buildings on Chicago’s South Side to installations using chalkboards and found objects. The interior galleries will become a Gesamtkunstwerk—or a whole work of art—bringing Gates’ distinct studio practice into this museum space. walkerart.org

Whether inviting visitors to Paris’ Place Vendôme to climb inside a pipeline intersected with tree trunks or presenting an interactive structure of stairs and walkways at the Whitney Biennial, Oscar Tuazon uses architectural forms to instigate new acts of community. Visitors to the Aspen Art Museum can engage with his latest experiment in transforming industrial materials into a gathering place, with a concrete fire pit installed on the museum’s roof-deck sculpture garden. In summer it is a place to sit and appreciate the mountain view; in winter it lights up as a cozy outdoor heater. aspenartmuseum.org

In 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat painted a work on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio in reaction to the death of a young black man at the hands of police. Rarely exhibited, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) depicts a figure surrounded by officers with batons, and was a visceral response to the extreme violence against artist Michael Stewart for allegedly tagging a subway station. This tight and timely show reflects on Basquiat’s engagement with black identity and police brutality. Pieces by Basquiat and Stewart are joined with archival material related to the 1983 incident and other contextual objects, all of which consider the cultural activism of the 1980s and remain searingly relevant today. guggenheim.org

This exhibition on the nature of light brings together around 250 objects manifesting some artistic response to physical or metaphorical illumination. Some involve actual radiance, like Fred Wilson’s The Way the Moon’s in Love with the Dark, a 6.5-foot-tall chandelier inspired by Ottoman and Venetian traditions, with Murano glass and mosque lights, and the immersive Corridor #2 mirror structure by Lucas Samaras. Other pieces react to the spiritual or divine, evoked through ancient sculptures and textiles, while many represent art’s ongoing attempt to capture the elusive qualities of light, such as work by Impressionist Childe Hassam. All offer a luminous new perspective on the museum’s impressive encyclopedic art collection. denverartmuseum.org