RASHID JOHNSON'S ARTWORKS are meditations on the cultural phenomena that shape African-Americans as a social group. Viewers of his videos, photographs, sculptures, paintings and installations are looking at deft presentations of slippery conceptual surfaces. However, abstract form is equally significant to the artist and guides his process. Craftsmanship, autobiography, design, theater, ambience and historical scholarship are always evident.

MARY MISS HAS been making art in, and about, the environment since the late 1960s. More specifically, she treats the surface of the landscape as a permeable skin, and pays particular attention to places where the solid parts of the planet meet the watery ones: riverbanks, lakefronts, tidal basins, even an old swimming pool.

Is bigger better? That’s a question many artists and architects are facing, as ever-expanding installations, multivenue exhibitions, vast architectural projects and outsize artworks grab the spotlight. Is bigger better? That's a question many artists and architects are facing, as ever-expanding installations, multivenue exhibitions, vast architectural projects and outsize artworks grab the spotlight.

Creating sculptures and installations to be photographed and then dismantled, some contemporary artists put a fresh spin on the notion of photographic truth.

Accidents, suicides, violent crimes, derelicts, cheap entertainers and luminous celebrities—these are the stuff of Weegee’s tabloid photos, starkly imaging mid-20th-century urban America.