Near Brumadinho, Brazil, about 60 kilometers from Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Gerais, the Instituto Inhotim is an open-air museum that combines art and nature with site-specific contemporary art in a sprawling landscape of botanical gardens.
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At the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte is the first solo museum exhibition of works by Elliot and Erick Jiménez. The artists, identical twin brothers, have conjured a body of work layered with personal identities, experiences of diaspora, references to art history and mythologies, and Lucumí spiritual traditions.
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At the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the first museum exhibition in Mexico in nearly 20 years for one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. The show surveys Orozco’s work from the 1990s to the present, spanning four floors and the museum’s public plaza. With more than 300 works—sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, paintings, and games—the exhibition explores Orozco’s practice of creating an interplay between objects and concepts.
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In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.
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At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.
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On January 4, 1966, the conceptual artist On Kawara made a painting recording that day’s date. The work, Jan. 4, 1966, with white letters and numbers on a solid blue background, was begun and finished that day, signed on the reverse, and placed in a handmade box with a clipping from the New York Times.
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In a remote valley of central eastern Nevada, a complex of shaped landmasses and monolithic structures is thought to be the largest sculpture in the world. Composed of rocks, compacted dirt, and concrete, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, Michael Heizer’s City is a vast work of Land Art.
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In 1970, for the US Pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale, Ed Ruscha took an unconventional approach to printmaking by screen printing hundreds of sheets of paper with chocolate paste. He hung them, floor to ceiling, in a single room that has been the only installation work of his long career. The Chocolate Room is on view now in its seventh iteration in the retrospective exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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In 1871 the American entrepreneur Minor Keith won a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad from the capital city of San José to the port city of Limón. The project would modernize the country and increase exports, like in Chile and Peru, following the industrial expansion of the U.S. But before the Costa Rican railroad was complete in 1890, the government defaulted on its payments and renegotiated a deal which gave Keith’s company 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railway and a 99-year lease on its operation.
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For seven years, a man explored the length, width, and height of the territory of Mexico. He traveled 33,302 kilometers, documenting the borders, cities, mountains, and volcanoes that shape the country. The explorer, Santiago Arau, is a photographer and filmmaker whose project, Territorios, is the subject of an exhibition at the Museo Amparo in Puebla.