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

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

Hosted by Tamar Avishai, the Lonely Palette is an accessible dive into some of the world’s most important works of art. The podcast mixes casual interviews with museum visitors on their impressions of how, where, why, and when the art was made. From a close look at why the pointillist dots of George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86) were so innovative, to the way Claes Oldenburg’s 1964 Giant Toothpaste Tube elevates the ordinary, each episode makes art history approachable by highlighting the human experience behind every creative expression. Episodes are ongoing and can be found on all audio streaming platforms. thelonelypalette.com

As the country contends with white supremacy embedded in its statuary, the University of Virginia has unveiled a memorial to a violent American history that’s rarely been acknowledged in public monuments. The campus itself was designed by slave owner Thomas Jefferson and thousands of enslaved people worked at the institution. The eyes of one of them—Isabella Gibbons—are engraved by the artist Eto Otitigbe on the sloping exterior wall of two concentric granite rings. Inside the abstract form designed by Höweler + Yoon are carved names when it rains that appear to weep. slavery.virginia.edu