Minnie Evans (1892-1987), a proudly self-taught black artist from North Carolina, made her first two drawings in 1935, compelled to do so by a voice in a dream. She created no more pictures for five years, then took up making art again, never stopping until a few years before her death. She is best known for stylized, mandalalike compositions composed of intertwined figural and floral designs, but she also produced surreal landscapes, interiors and biblical scenes.

In Raphaël Zarka’s recent exhibition at Bischoff/Weiss, the French artist (b. 1977) continued his interrogation of the dynamics of structures and shapes in an 11-minute video titled Gibellina Vecchia (2010), which was shot on 16mm film and transferred to HD. The piece revolves around the eponymous village in the Sicilian hills that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, and later rebuilt as Gibellina Nuova, about 12 miles away. In 1980, Alberto Burri was commissioned by the mayor of the city to construct a sprawling concrete monument among the ruins of the village.

An intriguing exhibition of Russian performance was one of the central elements of Performa 11. The show, titled "33 Fragments of Russian Performance" and organized with Garage center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, was exactly that: documentary shards (photos and videos primarily) of several dozen works that hinted at what has been happening in Russia since the 1970s.

Like many regional art scenes, Israel’s is tightly knit and has its own set of internal references. Artists from the region bear the responsibility of not only unpacking weighty issues but also rendering them communicable to a wider audience. Of late, we’ve seen many Israeli video artists move out of the country (often to Berlin or New York) to pursue this practice, launching successful international careers. In Dafna Shalom’s case, returning to Israel after living in New York for nearly two decades has possibly inspired her to create her best work yet.

More than a decade before Douglas Crimp's 1977 "Pictures" identified the appropriationist strategies of a generation, Robert Heinecken (1931- 2006) set aside his camera and turned to preexisting media imagery, particularly "the influx of printed promotional material," as he put it in a 1968 statement.