In joyous color, Niki de Saint Phalle grappled with climate change, HIV/AIDS awareness, and women’s rights, making space for serious social issues through a practice that included fantastic sculptures, environments, fashion, and even perfume. This first US exhibition of the French artist features more than 200 works that span the breadth of her interdisciplinary art, from the 1960s bullseye paintings that she used as dartboards to monumental later projects like the 1998 Tarot Garden installation in Italy inspired by cards of divination. Always finding new ways to alter perspectives through her art, she created transformative experiences aimed at changing the world. moma.org

The Los Angeles-based Christina Quarles has emerged as a powerful painter of acrylic works with tangles of elongated bodies moving fluidly through domestic environments. These vivid paintings reflect on the complex gender, sexual, and racial identities within each individual. This solo show at the MCA Chicago is the largest exhibition of her art yet, joining recent pieces with a new installation. Tumbling and falling together in bright colors, the figures in Quarles’s work echo the otherworldly forms of surrealism in their dynamic expression of how a person’s individuality pushes beyond the limits of their skin. mcachicago.org

Following a year in which much of life has felt on pause, the Walker Art Center is opening its exhibition on stillness that was postponed last spring. Concentrating on pieces made between the twentieth century and the present, it features live performances among its over 100 works by sixty artists including Marina Abramovic, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pope.L, and Maruja Mallo. Focusing on human movement, The Paradox of Stillness examines these artists’ search for static states in the ever-changing moments of life. walkerart.org

Spanish artist Juan Gris was central to the development of cubism alongside Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger. His death at the age of forty cut short a flourishing career and his contributions to the movement have been largely overlooked. This retrospective offers a rare overview of his work, bringing together more than forty paintings and collages that demonstrate how his practice evolved between 1911 and 1926. In distinctive still lifes where recognizable objects like guitars and fruit bowls were flattened and sharpened into abstraction, he used color, form, and a meticulous attention to composition that helped revolutionize modern art. dma.org

Aft er her bold 1980 debut in her persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, draped in 180 pairs of white gloves and declaring that “Black art must take more risks!,” Lorraine O’Grady has continued to confront the racism, sexism, and inequalities in the art world through performance, installations, and conceptual work. Finally, at the age of eighty-six, she is getting her first retrospective. Both/And surveys her four decades of tirelessly reinventing her practice and introduces a new persona decked out in armor recalling European colonialism and palm tree headgear evoking her Caribbean heritage. brooklynmuseum.org

On view thanks to a renovation, the most important paintings of Venice by Canaletto will be on display for the first time in more than seventy years. From a private art collection, the works first arrived in Britain in the 1730s and are owned by successive Dukes of Bedford. The twenty-three paintings explore Canaletto’s life and work, with a backdrop of eighteenth-century Venice and the Grand Tour. “Woburn Abbey is currently undergoing its biggest refurbishment since it first opened to the public in 1955. The renovations have therefore provided an ideal opportunity for The Duke and Duchess of Bedford generously to share a selection of Woburn’s greatest treasures with a wider audience,” says the Holburne’s director, Chris Stephens. holburne.org