The second installment of Desert X presents more than fifteen artists and their site-specific works in the Coachella Valley, California. The inaugural biennial

in 2017 included the work of Claudia Comte, Jeffrey Gibson, and Phillip K. Smith III, who addressed the social, political, and environmental narratives of the

surrounding landscape. desertx.org

When Margaret Kilgallen died in 2001 at the age of thirty-three, she was beginning to receive acclaim for her paintings and murals. In this first posthumous museum exhibition, the Aspen Art Museum explores her vibrant experimentation, with influences that ranged from letterpress and printmaking to folk art and freight-train graffiti. Along with her husband, artist Barry McGee, she was a central fi gure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement, based in San Francisco. Through found paper and illustrations that frequently featured ordinary people doing everyday things, she discovered beauty in the most humble of places. aspenartmuseum.org

When Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party toured the country from 1979 to 1989, few museums were comfortable with the vaginal imagery of its place settings—designed to represent thirty-nine historical and mythical women—so it was exhibited in gymnasiums and other unconventional settings. Now this pivotal work of feminist art has a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. Still, the monumental installation is only part of Chicago’s decades-long career in raising women’s voices and experiences. This sprawling retrospective in Miami recalls her roots in 1960s abstraction, and her use of traditionally feminine arts such as textiles in series like the 1980s Birth Project, for which women needleworkers created pieces about childbirth. icamiami.org

In Kambui Olujimi’s solo show, a group of chandeliers are piled on a makeshift raft . Although marooned, they are still illuminated, still dignified as beautiful objects. Through elegant works like this, the Brooklynbased artist evokes the failures of global systems of power, whether in the refugee crisis, incarceration, or public housing, as expressed in huge images of the imploding Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. On one wall, thirteen flags have their nationalistic symbols replaced with photographs of rocket catastrophes, the fiery scenes a reminder of the potential for collapse in our modern empires. blantonmuseum.org

Ansel Adams didn’t just capture the majesty of American landscapes—he recognized the importance of protecting them. He advocated for the establishment of national parks, and for limitations on development in the country’s surviving wilderness. This exhibition joins Adams’ images with those by fellow twentieth-century landscape photographers like Edward Weston, Laura Gilpin, and Eliot Porter, revealing the diverse ways they promoted environmental advocacy in their art. okcmoa.com

Perhaps it’s not surprising that now, in a time of anxiety and uncertainty, superheroes dominate our entertainment. Dating to the Depression,

with their emergence in comic books, these super-powered characters dramatically embodied ideas about American strength, morality, and the country's failures. This exhibition involves more than seventy works, including painting, installation, video, and photography, through which twentieth and twenty-first-century artists have responded to these heroes, particularly Superman and Wonder Woman. crystalbridges.org