Taking a page from Fred Wilson—and another from W. G. Sebald—Ms. Bloom has selected hundreds of objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection that speak to aspects of Jewish life—cups, ketubahs, amulets, Torah reading pointers—and framed them with quotations from figures as diverse as Leonard Cohen, Lou Andreas-Salomé (the first female psychoanalyst), Zola, Nietzsche, Woody Allen and Sigmund Freud. The installation transforms each arrangement of objects and texts into a conversation around a specific theme: luck, libraries, windows. The effect is an essayistic meditation on Jewish identity.

In one room, marriage and divorce contracts quilt a bed-like support. The marriage contracts are brightly colored and ornamented with peacocks, flowers and tigers. They come from Poland, Iran, Brooklyn, India and Shanghai, and specify the rights of the bride and groom. “The bride comes with a dowry of 2200 pizzi, 1800 in cash, 200 in household objects and jewelry, the rest unspecified,” reads one from Florence dated 1836. They stand in stark contrast to the black-and-white divorce contracts, which are ritually torn as they are filed.

In the next room are 21 lucky amulets. Some are shaped like hands, some like cats; they’re made from coral, bear’s claw, silver, gold and glass. These mysterious objects come from Israel, the Netherlands, North Africa and Italy. Some have specific purposes, like protecting newborn children or warding off the evil eye. The accompanying text meditates on the distinction between a lucky person and just plain luck.

Ms. Bloom did the installation design, framing her objects in a cool toothpaste-green and giving the museum’s Fifth Avenue rooms a Gattaca-like feel. Within it, some marvelous finds—Sigmund Freud’s Roman signet ring (a gift to his daughter) and his cigar box (a gift from a patient), a film of Schoenberg and Gershwin playing tennis in Beverly Hills—are harnessed to tell stories that ultimately say something larger about the diasporic Jewish community.

Objects are not just framed by Ms. Bloom’s installation—just as often, they are partly masked. Doorways encase 18th- and 19th-century paintings from the museum’s collection in structures that leave only cut-out rectangles for the eyes to peek out from. These shrouded portraits seem to watch you as you move from gallery to gallery.

Ms. Bloom’s quotation texts can have a slightly twee “sayings from famous Jews” feel. Its fetishization of smart-sounding things occasionally seems hackneyed, as in one piece that assembles quotations on synaesthesia from Marilyn Monroe, Mozart, Tilda Swinton, Jimi Hendrix and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She is at her best with objects: the elegant shadows of the spice bowls, the shapes of the amulets. She manages to give a voice to things like a collection of silver Torah pointers (tasseled, hollow, chained, with the gleam of a crooked finger) laid out on a piano-shaped table.

Ms. Bloom studied at CalArts and belongs to that generation of artists that includes Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, artists who are known for combining found imagery and text to make art that reflects on contemporary culture. (Indeed, the Jewish Museum is doubling up on so-called Pictures Generation artists with next month’s Jack Goldstein show, the first American retrospective of the artist.) Ms. Bloom is the historian among them. Her real strength lies in creating interventions using extant collections. If you have been to the MAK Museum in Vienna, you will remember her perfect permanent installation featuring the shadowy shapes of backlit Thonet bentwood chairs.

But it’s rare that a museum commission results in new work as nuanced and rich as this collaboration between Ms. Bloom and the Jewish Museum. Discovering Ms. Bloom’s world for the first time is like reading a book by an author with a resonant logic and sensibility. Her assembly of objects gets reabsorbed into the museum when the show is done, and this transitory quality is part of her work’s spectral allure. (Through August 4, 2013)

Jewish Museum. (oh_annaluise/Flickr)

A fine bit of news to close out this Monday: the Jewish Museum announced today that it will begin offering pay-what-you hours on Thursday evenings, from 5 to 9 p.m. The new program goes into effect on Jan. 3.

This also means that the museum will stay open one hour later than it has in the past on those days. It previously closed at 8 p.m. on Thursdays. If you visit the Jewish Museum in the next few months, you can catch the very beautiful "Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol" show, which was reviewed by Observer critic Maika Pollack right here.

Freckles, cigarettes and sometimes even whole human beings could be made to disappear from prints with a touch of lead pencil to negative, as shown in Robert Johnson’s how-to book on photographic retouching from 1930. And figures could just as mysteriously appear, as in Matthew Brady’s 1865 photo Sherman and His Generals, in which an officer late for a group shot was simply—presto!—montaged in. In the 19th century, it took just a few dabs of India ink to transform day into night. Technicians used whatever means were at hand to improve on reality, just as today’s photo editors and iPhoners wield Photoshop or Instagram to correct details or enliven dull shots.

The most technically complex examples in the show come from art photography: Oscar Gustave Rejlander made artful compositions by printing parts of some 30 different negatives on a single sheet to create one seamless image. And all the grim and goofy posing (clutched bibles, grief-stricken slumping) done by models in Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away (1858) was for the purpose of enacting a deathbed scene—an especially elaborate example of photography rivaling the dominant medium of the day, painting. To make his famous photo Leap Into the Void (1960), the conceptual artist Yves Klein combined two photographs—one that shows him diving from a rooftop onto a canvas tarp held by men below, and another that shows the same location, a cobblestone street, without any action taking place. Combining the two resulted in a classic image of artistic recklessness and bravado: Klein appears to leap into thin air.

Other manipulations were made in the name of science: John Lovell’s Composite of Class of ’87 and Composite of Harvard “Annex” are blurry multiple-exposure portraits of the college’s entire male and female graduating classes overlaid one on top of the other. The experiment resulted in a soft-lipped, surprisingly handsome man and a stern but pretty woman. These two proto-preppies are the social flip side to French photographer Francis Galton’s composite portraits of Parisian criminals from 1877, images that overlay negatives in an attempt to divine “features common among men convicted of crimes of violence.” In Galton’s experiment, seven negatives combine to produce a rakishly attractive unshaven convict.

A section on photographic trickery in politics stands out, especially examples from Stalin’s Russia, where people vanished from official imagery as soon as they fell out of political favor. A photo of the 15th Regional Party Conference of Leningrad in textbooks printed between 1926 and 1949 shows five men, then four, then three, until the conference dwindles to a duo. The others were, quite literally, erased from history.

Just as we have them on the Internet today, the 19th century had its photographic memes—winged elephants, decapitation and double, triple and quintuple exposures. We now associate photography with immediacy, but in the medium’s first years, snap and shoot didn’t yet exist— French propaganda photographs from 1871 restaged famous news events like executions and massacres to imbue them with extra vividness.

The unexpected star of the Met’s show is Weegee’s Times Square, New York (1952–59), which the photographer described as “Under 10 feet of water on a sunny afternoon.” Through the magic of double exposure it shows a bustling Times Square seemingly full of commuters trudging through flooded streets. Seeing it this month might evoke news photographs of Avenue C, or Chelsea, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Nearby, at the Jewish Museum, “Sharon Lockhart|Noa Eshkol” stages an encounter between artists several generations apart. Ms. Eshkol (1924-2007), the daughter of Israel’s third prime minister, was a visual artist and choreographer who viewed dance as a utopian social project. Ms. Lockhart, a Los Angeles-based artist, first saw Ms. Eshkol’s work four years ago, and was inspired to create a project in response to it.

Her video homage, Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets (2011), is an immersive looped installation that presents a selection of Ms. Eshkol’s dances. The performers—grave, middle-aged women and one man, wearing black leotards—slowly gesticulate and sway in unison to a metronomic beat. They move among nine colorful textile works, the “wall carpets” of the video’s title. These patchwork panels of Ms. Eshkol’s are also on display; big painting-like compositions made from stitched-together scraps of cloth, they carry vaguely Old Testament titles like Creeper on a Tree and Elijah’s Throne, and look like something highly skilled hippie parents might make for a newborn.

Ms. Eshkol, whose dancers lived in a utopian, kibbutz-like world of shared work duties and group dance classes, is best known outside of Israel for developing a written system to capture and articulate the most minute physical gestures. “I dared to have the nerve to create a language,” she once said grandiosely of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation system. Examples of her opaque notations, on display in a vitrine, look like orchestra sheet music with body parts taking the place of instruments. Each limb is scored separately, with a series of cryptic arrows and numbers meant to stand for directions of movement and counted beats.

Ms. Lockhart’s photographs of the rickety and weathered globe-like structures that Ms. Eshkol used to teach bodily movement to dance students express a sort of awe in and bewilderment at the world Ms. Eshkol reveals. Her treatment of Ms. Eshkol’s work remains somewhat straight-faced and anthropological, but her pleasure in its eccentricity is almost tangible. The show does not explain Ms. Eshkol’s various systems as much as it celebrates and even fetishizes their enigmatic qualities.

Previous subjects of Ms. Lockhart’s films have included a girls basketball team in Tokyo, a shipyard in rural Maine and a Brazilian tribe. She seems drawn to slightly outside-the-mainstream communities, like that of Ms. Eshkol’s dancers. She excels at revealing oddball modernist projects, and you get the sense that if such obscure projects had never existed, she would be compelled to invent them. In this way, her work is like that of contemporary artist Richard Hawkins’s collages drawing on the history of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance. Though the show’s emphasis on aging dancers and dusty movement models makes you feel that all of the most fascinating artistic enterprises might be a thing of the past, it ultimately resists such nostalgia by presenting archival scholarship as new art. The results, like the faked photography at the Met, are an unsettling blend of the documentary and the fantastical.

editorial@observer.com

Hoffmann. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Jens Hoffmann, the director of San Francisco's Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, is set to become a deputy director at the Jewish Museum. We first caught wind of a possible move via the Baer Faxt newsletter, and a representative at the museum confirmed today that he will start by the end of the year. Details about his exact title and start date are currently being worked out.

Mr. Hoffmann has served as director of CCA Wattis since 2007, and organized a number of high-profile international exhibitions, including the 2011 Istanbul Biennial (with Adriano Pedrosa), the 2007 Lyon Biennial and (as a co-curator) the inaugural Berlin Biennial in 1998. He also staged the infamous Sixth Caribbean Biennial with Maurizio Cattelan, a fictional biennial that saw a number of artists vacation in a resort on the island of St. Kitts in 1999.

The hire could be a sign that the Jewish Museum's new director, Claudia Gould, is planning to increase contemporary art programming at the Upper East Side institution. Ms. Gould joined the museum last year, after serving as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania since 1999. When her appointment was announced in August 2011, she told The New York Times, “Certainly the mission will not change, but I do come from a contemporary background, and even the historical shows or exhibitions of Judaica [may reflect that]." At the moment a number of New York museums are fiercely competing to attract new patrons through new contemporary art programs. Early this year, the Met hired Tate Modern's chief curator, Sheena Wagstaff, to head a new department of art from the 20th and 21st centuries.

A prolific curator, Mr. Hoffmann is no stranger to New York, having held positions at the Guggenheim and Dia. He has also organized shows in many of the city's galleries, including "Exhibitions of an Exhibition" at Casey Kaplan in 2003 and (with his brother, Jacob Hoffmann) 303's winning "Marxism" show—about the influence of the Marx Brothers on art—just this past summer.

Now there is news that the show will come to New York, as critic Christopher Knight mentioned in a review of the OCMA's show. The Jewish Museum will host the show, which is titled "Jack Goldstein x 10,000" and curated by former MOCA senior curator Philipp Kaiser (who has since left to become director of Cologne's Museum Ludwig), in Spring 2013. Its dates are May 10 to Sept. 29. The museum's director, Claudia Gould, told The Observer that when she was still director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, the position she held before joining the Jewish Museum last year, that museum had considered taking on the show but scheduling issues prevented it.

Three months ago, Ms. Gould was at a dinner party with artist Robert Longo, who sometimes showed alongside Goldstein in the 1980s. "We started talking about Jack Goldstein's work, and I realized, 'I have to call Orange County,'" Ms. Gould recalled. The OCMA's director, Dennis Szakacs, told her that the show did not yet have an East Coast venue, and so the Jewish Museum would be able to present it. "We were lucky," she said.

"It would have been a missed opportunity for the exhibition not to go to New York," Mr. Szakacs told us by phone. He said that the OCMA had considered a Goldstein show a number of years ago, but that it had not come together at the time. In 2009, it purchased a painting by the artist. "He was an important figure who wasn't really in the collection," he said. "It was just a gap that we needed to address."

The gap is not only at the OCMA. Many of Goldstein's colleagues from the Pictures group, like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine have had major museum shows in recent years that have all appeared in New York (at MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney, respectively), but this is Goldstein's first American retrospective. It spans the length of his career, from his performance work in the early 1970s as a student at CalArts through the iconic short films he made over that decade to the meticulous photorealistic paintings of phenomena in night skies—lightning strikes, glowing moons—that he made with teams of assistants in the 1980s. His writings—he wrote aphorisms throughout his career—will also be included.

Goldstein's best known works are probably those 1970s short films, like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), which has that movie studio's trademark lion roaring for a few minutes on loop or Shane (1975), in which a German Shepherd barks periodically. His films occasionally pop up in museum shows, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Metro Pictures have hosted posthumous surveys of his paintings, but it's been difficult to see the full breadth of his work. (This summer offers a fine, albeit tiny exception: there's a painting at the New Museum, a film at 303 and a record at Metro Pictures.)

Much of Goldstein's career was spent in California, making the OCMA's rescue of the show apt. His family moved to L.A. from Montreal in his youth, and he got his bachelor's degree at Chouinard, which became CalArts, where he got his MFA. (For one graduate degree project he buried himself underground, breathing through plastic tubes as an above-ground light connected to a stethoscope blinked along with his heartbeats.) He was also primarily in Southern California from the late 1980s until his suicide in 2003 at age 57.

From 1974 to the late '80s, though, he lived and worked in New York. His work was included in the 1977 Douglas Crimp–curated "Pictures" show at the Artists Space gallery, an exhibition that came to define an early postmodern approach to images in contemporary art. In the following decade he showed at Metro Pictures in Soho, and later with dealers Josh Baer and John Weber.

The show has personal significance for Ms. Gould, who first met Goldstein when she was working at Artists Space in the early 1980s. "He would never remember me, of course, because I was an intern," she told The Observer. That was her entry into the art world—Cindy Sherman worked at the front desk then, she said, and it was where she first met Messrs. Longo and Prince and other artists of her generation. She became director of Artists Space in 1994.

As for why Goldstein is not more widely known, some have pointed to his struggle with depression and drug problems in the 1990s, when he rarely showed new work. In addition, his switch from film to immaculately handled large-scale paintings in the 1980s ran counter to the dominant modes of art making at the time. The paintings themselves cut against the popular Neo-Expressionist mode, and though he was financially successful for a period, those works were more difficult to square with the primarily photographic art being made by most of his Pictures colleagues.

Of course, it's never possible to fully know why some artists achieve quick, lasting, widespread success and others do not. "Sometimes it seems like there's no rhyme or reason to it," Mr. Szakacs said. But as times and tastes have changed in recent years, Goldstein's stature has grown, and "since his death there has been this grand mythology about him," Ms. Gould said.

That legend is in no small part due to Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, a book of oral histories with Goldstein and many of his friends and acquaintances, conducted by Richard Hertz, that came out in 2003, shortly after the artist's death. The volume presents Goldstein as a hyper-talented and hyper-competitive artist. The art market boom was just beginning and he had a studio next to the "Watchtower" building near the Brooklyn Bridge, "where the Mafia would drop off dead bodies," he told Mr. Hertz. In one interview, he talks about speeding across the bridge in Corvettes at 200 miles per hour, and taping his paintings so fastidiously for airbrushing that it "took two people a complete day to get all of the tape off one painting."

In another interview, Goldstein recalls that early on at CalArts, when he showed his work to one of his teachers, the now widely esteemed conceptual artist John Baldessari, he got no reaction. "I figured that if he wasn't impressed, then there wasn't anything to be impressed by," he says. "If you're going to be an artist, you have to be the best at what you do. Some people settle for a slot in between. I have always been oriented to the idea that if you’re not on top of the pile, there’s no reason for doing it at all." Finally, New Yorkers will have a chance to see what he did about that.

Update: 2:30 p.m.: An earlier version of this article misstated when plans for the show to travel to the Jewish Museum were announced.

Mel Bochner, 'Liar,' 2007. (Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc.)

Late last week, Artnet magazine revealed on its Twitter feed that the Jewish Museum was planning a Mel Bochner retrospective. Today, Carol Vogel has the details in her Inside Art column: it's set to open in May 2014 and "will focus on his thesaurus-inspired paintings — canvases that chart his nearly 50-year exploration of words, language and text."

Ms. Vogel notes that Mr. Bochner, 72, was once a guard at the Jewish Museum. Not a very good one, as it turns out:

"When he was a guard at the Jewish Museum in New York nearly 50 years ago, Mel Bochner was leading a double life. 'I would work at the museum all day and paint all night,” he recalled in a telephone interview. 'I would come to work tired. One day I got caught taking a nap behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture and got fired.'"

Congratulations on the show, Mr. Bochner.

A good Vuillard painting looks like the Japanese woodblock prints he collected: the women are stippled poufs defined by textiles and topknots, the wallpaper striped or floral quadrilaterals. If there are pictures on the walls and vases on the sideboards, these are exploited as opportunities for more flat flourish. Self-Portrait With Waroquy (1889), made when the painter was just 21, shows his own image reflected in the sort of oxidized mirror that is commonly built in above Parisian fireplaces. The subject presages his taste for conflating people with their furnishings, and the addled surface and Manet-like still life at the painting’s front right edge show off an early verve with the brush.

When Vuillard was in his prime, as he was when he painted Woman in a Striped Dress (1895), every last bit of his canvases was decorative, as if it had been cut from the kind of pretty, expensive paper used to wrap artisanal chocolate bars or fancy soap. Yet his world seems hollow behind all this pattern and color: Pepto-Bismol pinks and mauves bloom on unprimed, cardboard-brown ground. Melting pink and light blue strokes dematerialize the world in Messieurs and Mesdames Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune (1905), which has four tiny figures in a living room psychedelically replete with enormous, marshmallowing pastel paintings and carpets; the house is decorated within an inch of its life, and Vuillard’s painting itself seems aware of its status as one more pretty object destined for such a cluttered interior.

Unlike his peer Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard had no ambitions to paint nudes or landscapes. “I don’t paint portraits, I paint people in their surroundings,” he once said, and his best subjects are invariably indoors. When not containing his mother, his interiors were often populated with art dealers and editors of little magazines, the kinds of people who made painting such as his possible. His finest works, like Misia and Vallotton at Villeneuve (1899), were of Thadée Natanson, publisher of the magazine La Revue Blanche (in whose offices Vuillard had his first show in 1891), and Natanson’s pretty wife, Misia Godebska, the radical Russian pianist who modeled for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and whose salon was attended by Mallarmé, André Gide, Colette and Coco Chanel. Some of Vuillard’s snapshots, taken in 1897 with a Brownie camera, show the Natanson household plastered with patterned wallpaper, thick with ferns, and chock-full of elaborate Thonet furniture; you have to wonder what kind of person takes such obsessive photos of his friends’ chairs. His interest in pattern continues in the red and turquoise stage bills commissioned by the Theatre de l’Oeuvre, and on a wall of color lithographs of wallpaper patterns made for the art dealer Ambrose Vollard.

Vuillard continued to paint, but grew increasingly distant from bohemian culture. His patrons changed; he became a perpetual houseguest in a world of wealthy bankers, painting unnecessarily large, usually single-subject portraits in chilly interiors the opposite of the warm, crowded rooms of 1896. When Vuillard tried to faithfully record these—and he grew less and not more abstract as he grew older—he was lost. Henri and Marcel Kapfer in Their Dining Room (1912) is not just an uninteresting painting—it looks as though it was made by a different painter.

IF VUILLARD’S INTERIORS are the painterly equivalent of Marcel Proust’s prose, all layers of lush and evocative hushed domestic detail, Merlin Carpenter’s “Tate Café,” which ended its run at Reena Spaulings gallery this past weekend, evoked Michel Houellebecq. It was a jaundiced look at the late-capitalist reality of contemporary art-making. The show reproduced with exquisite fidelity the gift store and espresso bar of the iconic London museum Tate Modern, where, during the museum’s “Pop Life” exhibition in 2009, Mr. Carpenter’s dealers at Reena Spaulings exhibited knockoffs of his artworks without his consent.

On the wall at Reena Spaulings were Yayoi Kusama and Damien Hirst posters, as well as stacks of current issues of the English newspaper The Guardian next to banks of plastic ersatz Marcel Breuer chairs. There was a nonfunctional cooler filled with rotting sandwiches, yogurts and fruit. Among the items for sale were Carpenter-themed leggings (full disclosure, this writer purchased a pair for $100) and pillowcases made from pages reproduced from the Reena Spaulings guest book.

Galleries are feeding into the contemporary art museums at an ever-increasing metabolic rate: Richard Prince's Spiritual America took 30 years to go from Rivington Street to the Tate, but Mr. Carpenter found his work in the Tate gift shop in just three. Gift shops supplement the museum by offering small reproductions of artworks for visitors to take home; they represent the n+1 of art viewing. The Tate Café puts that cultural excess inside a commercial gallery again, creating a mise en abyme of cultural capital generation.

"Tate Café" functioned as the younger, more sinister and hyperbolic post-Marxist cousin of the grand Romantic gesture by Urs Fischer five years ago in which Gavin Brown’s gallery floor was scooped out to a depth of eight feet. While Mr. Fischer’s installation made you consider the material workings of the gallery—its plumbing, electricity, cavernous emptiness and physical relationship to the city-as-site—"Tate Café" exposed the vampiric cultural capital creation (refrigerator magnets, tote bags) that shadows any successful venture in contemporary art. Mr. Carpenter’s show was an extension of F.T. Marinetti’s position: His museums are mausoleums, yet now populated by curators who suck the life-blood from newly created works of art and toss their victims to gift shop managers.

To the extent that Reena Spaulings is profiting from the exposé, Mr. Carpenter’s work protests too much. A self-conscious online text that accompanies the show, an interview between Mr. Carpenter and gallery owners John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad, was also redundant in the face of the singularly articulate installation. Still, the show is on my short list for best gallery exhibition of 2012; like Vuillard’s work, it investigates the kinds of interiors in which we view art—not the private sitting rooms of the bohemian or wealthy, but the vast new temples of contemporary art tourism.

editorial@observer.com

WEDNESDAY, MAY 23

Opening: "Common Ground" at Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund's latest show in City Hall Park brings together 10 artists (11, if you count Messrs. Elmgreen & Dragset separately), including Thomas Schütte, Jenny Holzer and Amalia Pica, who play with, twist apart and radically transmogrify the operation of traditional public sculpture, which (PAF's release notes) typically involves "a clear civic purpose." To wit, there will be a giant inflatable ketchup bottle by Paul McCarthy, as well as a concrete Laocoön by Justin Matherly, who was a standout at Frieze New York. Leave work early. A performance arrives at 5:45 p.m. —Andrew Russeth
City Hall Park, bordered by Broadway, Chambers Street, Centre Street and Park Row, 5:30–6:30 p.m.

Talk: Michael Findlay and Veronique Chagnon-Burke on "The Value of Art," at NYPL
Michael Findlay, director of Acquavella Galleries and author of The Value of Art, speaks to Véronique Chagnon-Burke, director of studies at Christie's Education, about his new book. Mr. Findlay and Ms. Chagnon-Burke will explore the history and the present state of the art market in a discussion and a Q&A session with the audience. —Rozalia Jovanovic
New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, New York, 6 p.m.

Party: The Kitchen Gala at Capitale
Come early for the dinner with performances by David Cossin, Jason Moran and Shara Worden. Stay for the D.J. set by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy. Rarely do good causes and fun parties intersect so perfectly. —D.D.
Capitale, 130 Bowery at Grand Street, New York, 6 p.m., after party at 9:30 p.m. Tickets start at $500/$75 for the after party.

THURSDAY, MAY 24

Screening: The Triptych at the Brooklyn Museum
Afro-Punk Pictures and the Weeksville Heritage Center present The Triptych, which focuses on the work of artists Sanford Biggers, Wangechi Mutu and Barron Claiborne. A live Q&A will follow the screening. —Michael H. Miller
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn 7 p.m., $12, www.museumtix.com

Book Signing: David Benjamin Sherry, "Quantum Light," at Salon 94
David Benjamin Sherry, who currently has a show up at Salon 94 on the Lower East Side through June 2, will be at the gallery's Freeman Alley space signing Quantum Light, his second monograph. --M.H.M.
Salon 94, 1 Freeman Alley, New York, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Talk: Lisa Yuskavage and Norman Kleeblatt on "Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890–1940" at the Jewish Museum
Mr. Kleeblatt, consulting curator on the Jewish Museum's current Vuillard show, and Ms. Yuskavage discuss Vuillard's enduring influence. According to the museum, the artist was quite an influence on Ms. Yuskavage's early work and remains "a constant reference…in her choices regarding composition, color and subject matter." —A.R.
Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, 6:30 p.m., $15

Presentation: Constant Dullaart, "Terms of Service," at New Museum
As part of the "New Silent" series, organized by departing Rhizome director Lauren Cornell, Constant Dullaart comes to the New Museum to premiere a new series of work responding to the Terms of Service conditions recently employed by several Internet services. Mr. Dullaart publicly interacts with manipulated versions of previously existing online spaces, and in that way recontextualizes ways of dealing with representation. —R.J.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, 7 p.m.

Lawrence Weiner, 'NO TREE NO BRANCH,' 2011/12. (Photo by Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

The Jewish Museum just sent over this little Friday delight, a new work by Lawrence Weiner that will hang in the entrance lobby of the museum through May 13. It's called NO TREE NO BRANCH (2011/12), and is based, according to the news release, on the Yiddish saying: "All the stars in the sky have the same face." Mr. Weiner spelled it out in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and broke it into pieces. Here's an explanation from the release:

"[T]he three languages... transform an originally isolationist "them/us" adage into an inclusive, non-hierarchical statement outlining one of the foremost precepts of peace. The sayings are arranged to break a circle, along with the words, NO TREE and NO BRANCH. Another text, in the center of the broken circle, reads AN OLIVE TREE IS AN OLIVE TREE FOR ALL THAT. These simple statement/icons can be seen as plain unambiguous shapes. Yet, arranged together, they also bear deep symbolic meaning - the olive branch of peace, the tree of life, and the representation of movement with curvilinear lines to express simultaneity.

It's always a nice surprise to see Mr. Weiner's text in a new language. He's worked in quite a few tongues at this point! Here is a piece in Icelandic (our favorite), one in French, one in Spanish, two more in Arabic and one in Mandarin Chinese.