Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia @ The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

It is a strange wonder to see the past's imagination of the future. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis presents Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. This psychedelic, powerful, and comprehensive exhibition examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. A time of great upheaval, the works radically challenge social norms that are relevant to the present--the control of female sexuality, domestic & international warfare, ecological destruction, implicit & explicit racisms... As they comment on their present moment, these artists, architects, and designers in turn imagine alternative utopias--communities of empowerment, creation, education, and freedom. Challenging traditional mediums, the exhibition features experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive and participatory media environments, alternative publishing and ephemera, and experimental film. Check out Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia at the Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, Minnesota, until February 28th. Text by Keely Shinners. Photographs by Keely Shinners and Neelufar Franklin.

Dreams In Blue: Read Our Interview With Artist and Painter Phillip Mueller On The Eve Of His Solo Show At Carbon 12 Gallery In Dubai →

Viennese artist Phillip Mueller’s art is mythical, fantastical and deranged. It exists on a plane somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch splashed with modern pop references, Thomas Kinkade on acid and a print out from your brain of a recurring nightmare. However, there is also something so sweet, alluring and romantic about his work. Mueller, whose solo show opens tonight at Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai, is a genuine painter and he is studious about his work. In a world devoid of figurative meaning in painting, Mueller uses his paint and brushes almost like a protest, and the depth of his work is a war against contemporary’s artist stodginess. Click here to read more. 

Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon "Forgetting the Hand" @ David Zwirner in New York

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of collaborative works by Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon, on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York. Gallery artists since 1998 and 1995 respectively, this is the first time the pair has worked together. The drawings were originally created for a zine published by David Zwirner Books to coincide with Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (September 2015). The collaboration began in Summer 2015 with the artists swapping the first of a series of drawings to be completed by the other. In a variation of the “exquisite corpse” method in which a partner is only given portions of an otherwise concealed drawing to work on, Dzama and Pettibon developed each other’s compositions through illustrations, collage, and writing. Just as the surrealists invented the technique in the early twentieth century as a playful and ultimately enriching exercise, the present drawings combine the two artists’ distinct styles in a revealing and often seamless fashion. In several works, it is almost impossible to determine who made what, which indicates how both strove to assimilate the other’s vision or anticipate his response. Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon "Forgetting the Hand" will be on view until February 20, 2016 at David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

"Fall Out Shelter" Maya Jeffereis Gives An Artist Talk and Facilitates Hypothetical Dooms-Day Scenarios at Overnight Projects In Burlington, Vermont

New York based Maya Jeffereis invites participants to engage in a conversation about politics of identity and morality by participating in a military training exercise. The exercise is taken from a US military training document to test officers’ values and decision-making processes. In a hypothetical end of the world scenario, ten people of diverse backgrounds occupy a fall-out shelter. However, the shelter can guarantee survival for only six people. Participants must decide which four are to be excluded from the group in order that the remaining six may live to rebuild society. In this exercise, participants must argue in favor of and against each of the occupants until the group reaches a full consensus. "Fall Out Shelter" will be held at Overnight Projects on January 16, 2016 in Burlington, Vermont. 

"Looking Back" The 10th White Columns Annual, Selected by Matthew Higgs

White Columns present “Looking Back”, the tenth installment of the White Columns Annual. For the past decade the exhibition has been a fixture on White Columns’ calendar. Each year, an individual or a collaborative team (e.g. an artist, a curator, a writer, etc.) is invited to organize an exhibition based on their personal experiences with art in New York during the previous year. For the tenth ‘Annual’ exhibition – coinciding with his tenth year as White Columns’ Director - Matthew Higgs has made this year’s selection. (Higgs also selected the inaugural Annual in 2006.) Looking Back will be on view until February 20, 2016 at White Columns, 320 West 13th Street, New York. photographs by Tenlie Mourning

Masami Teraoka’s Apocalyptic Theater/The Pope, Putin, Peach Boy and Pussy Riot Galore at Catherine Clark Gallery In San Francisco

Catharine Clark Gallery presents Masami Teraoka’s Apocalyptic Theater/Pussy Riot, The Pope, Putin, and Peach Boy, a solo exhibition of new and selected work by Masami Teraoka. The exhibit features four large triptych paintings more than a decade in the making, in which Teraoka continues his brazen portrayals of abusive power. While shocking and lurid, the exhibit (titled after the villains and heroes in the artist’s theatrical renderings) is also sardonic and impishly humorous: power changes hands, traditional roles reverse, and fates are reimagined. Mirroring the triptych construction of his paintings, Teraoka’s tableaus literally and figuratively open the secretive and dark underworlds of institutional power to Teraoka’s singular brand of unabashed truthtelling, searing criticism, and playful ridicule. The exhibition will be on view until February 20, 2016 at Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah Street, San Francisco. Photographs by Bradley Golden

Molly Soda "From my Bedroom to Yours" @ Annka Kultys Gallery In London

Annka Kultys Gallery presents From My Bedroom to Yours, Molly Soda’s first solo exhibition outside her native United States. The show features twenty recent works by the Detroit-based digital artist realised across a variety of digital platforms, including videos, gifs and NewHive. Born in 1989 and currently 26, Soda explains her work is about girls and for girls in their bedrooms, and takes the private behaviors inherent to those spaces and makes them public, reflecting how that process changes the way in which those behaviors are seen and contextualized. As a result, her images are raw, rejecting conventional beauty norms, whilst still maintaining a tween-Tumblr aesthetic and employing kitsch elements and lowbrow internet culture. From My Bedroom to Yours will be on view until January 16, 2016 at Annka Kultys Gallery, 472 Hackney Road, Unit 3, 1st Floor, London

Nobuyoshi Araki "Love On The Left Eye" @ Little Big Man Gallery In Los Angeles

Little Big Man Gallery presents “Love on the Left Eye,” a solo exhibition of works by Nobuyoshi Araki. The prints included in this exhibit have been selected from the photographer’s most recent work. The title of this exhibition refers to Ed van der Elsken’s 1956 photobook “Love on the Left Bank.” When Araki was around twenty years old, he saw “Love on the Left Bank,” and took some photographs of women in poses inspired by this book; “Love on the Left Eye” could also be seen as an homage to van der Elsken. After a recent stroke that left him mostly blind in his right eye, he has decided to black out the right side of his photographs so that the viewer can see what he sees. Love On The Left Eye will be on view until February 16, 2015 at Little Big Man Gallery, 1427 East 4th Street in Los Angeles

Sam Anderson "Endless Love" @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin

Tanya Leighton presents Endless Love, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by American artist Sam Anderson. Anderson's multidisciplinary practice focuses on the peripheral, the bit-part actors of life that arrive to bring about plot development and then slink off to the fringe. These figures are studied and organized, but never defined by Anderson, who asks her viewers to regard their personalities as carefully as they would themselves. Arranged into grid-like patterns that call to mind urban planning, public smoking areas, playgrounds, and other spaces that have been imagined and built for human interaction, Anderson's sculptures are subject to the impulse of an architect they have never met. Sam Anderson "Endless Love" will be on view until January 14, 2016 at Tanya Leighton, Kurfürstenstraße 156, 10785 Berlin, Germany

Alex Israel At the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino

Alex Israel lives and works in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1982. Deeply entwined with his home town, Israel’s art explores the iconography of L.A. and Hollywood, and the cult of celebrity. It posits L.A. as central to an understanding of American culture and the American dream. The exhibition ”Alex Israel at The Huntington” places 16 of Israel’s paintings and sculptures, as well as two site-specific murals, among the works in the historic Huntington Art Gallery, which once served as the residence of Gilded Age collectors Henry and Arabella Huntington and, since 1928, as the gallery for a celebrated European art collection. Intended to spark a dialogue between the new and the old, this intervention of Israel’s work within the Gallery creates a discourse on place and identity, two things fundamental to understanding Henry Huntington’s own love of Southern California, a region whose identity he helped to forge. Alex Israel at The Huntington will be on view until July 11, 2016 at the The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA

Yoko Ono "Golden Ladders" @ Faurschou Foundation in Beijing

Faurschou Foundation presents the first solo exhibition with the world-renowned artist Yoko Ono in Beijing. The exhibition will offer the public an opportunity to participate in her interactive art and take part in her honest and utopian, yet forceful, universe and life philosophy. The exhibition shows a variety of works from Yoko Ono's extensive artistic career, and includes important pieces from her early Fluxus and Conceptual work. Ideas, rather than materials, make up the core of Yoko Ono’s art. Based on verbal or written instructions for actions that are utopian, ephemeral and performable, Yoko Ono presents viewers with art which becomes a shared mental or physical experience. Yoko Ono: Golden Ladders will be on view until July 3, 2016 at the Faurschou Foundation in Beijing

The New Contemporary at the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute's already extensive contemporary art collection was made richer this year by the generous donation of Chicago art collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. The 44 paintings, sculptures, and photographs complete the largest donation in the museum's history. Their gift charts the course of the most adventurous art movements since the 1950s, featuring abstract expressionist Cy Twombly and Pop Art legend Andy Warhol. The collection also chronicles the significant and enduring influence of Pop Art on later generations of artists, including the photography-based critiques of Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, and the pop-culture riffs of Jeff Koons. Newly designed, the New Contemporary exhibit at the Art Institute features these new donations alongside its comprehensive collection of works by Jackson Pollack, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Nan Goldin, Barbara Kruger, and more. See the exhibition now at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL. Photographs by Keely Shinners

RIP Ellsworth Kelly (1927 - 2015)

Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing simplicity of form, He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York and died there at the age of 92. photograph by Michel Grinberg

A Belgian Artist Makes His Big Break In America: Read Our Interview With Musician and Artist Joris Van de Moortel →

Joris Van de Moortel, 31, has intrusive bluish-gray eyes. They are unsettling; despite the subdued kindness that surrounds them. Looking in to them one realizes Moortel doesn’t see the same boundaries most of us do, the boundaries that most of us construct our lives around. Moortel smashes, sometimes literally, the line between art and music. He is both musician and artist and the two feed off one another. Moortel makes mixed media pieces that often incorporate elements of his musical performances; a guitar he smashed on stage the night before, panels from a stage he played on. Sometimes the work comes after a performance; sometimes it’s made during. Read our interview with the artist here. 

Takuroh Toyama "Float" Photography Exhibition At Kata Gallery's Ebisu Liquid Room in Tokyo

Takuroh Toyama is a photographer based in Tokyo and my good friend. He actually has a lot to do with how I started taking photographs and continue doing it now. I had never encountered photography that moved me before, but the first time I saw his photos it felt like they were somehow different from anything I'd seen up to that point, and I still can clearly remember how excited they made me. It doesn't matter if the subject is fashion or a band, his pictures have a consistency and are full of his own thoughts and viewpoint. That isn't a negative thing, it's in every way positive, and there is a chaotic blend of a longing gaze that isn't offensive, and a warmth overflowing with humanity. He introduced me to the work of amazing photographers like Ryan McGinley and Peter Sutherland. He always walks around with his camera and is always taking pictures. He never does anything stupid like going to hip parties and only taking pictures of cool people. He knows those kinds of pictures aren't any good (they just get consumed), and he is well aware the "cool" generally talked about is a persona. I really feel like I learned a lot from that attitude of his and his work which is full of it. His exhibition ended just the other day. I helped out and just because I was free I went there many days, and there were always only good people there. The mood was always good, and even though it's too bad that it ended, you can see his photos online too, so definitely take a look. text and photographs by Yuki Kikuchi. Translation by Bowen Cassey

Read Autre's Top 10 Picks For The Best Gallery Exhibitions Of 2015 →

Click here to read Adam Lehrer's top 10 picks for the best art exhibitions of 2015.