It’s not surprising that Scott Reeder lives in Wisconsin, birthplace of The Onion. Like the satirical newspaper, Reeder manages to get a lot of mileage out of the sometimes sad confluence of sensationalism and everyday life.

The unanswerable questions that motivate many cross-disciplinary careers—what is the difference between art and craft? between sculpture and furniture?—fall away when the work they generate is any good.

Babies can be adorable, but Michael Smith's Baby IKKI . . . well, his name says it all. Played by the artist in diapers and a scalloped bonnet, the character is an 18-month-old toddler that Smith invented in the feminist early '70s.

Michael Joaquin Grey (b. 1961) has been known since the early '90s for making works that reference the principles governing the growth and transformation of things living and inanimate.

Among the pleasures of tracking the changes that Joanne Greenbaum has put her painting through in the last decade or so is watching her try out ideas, bring them to fruition, exhaust them and move on. All the while, she retains her core painterly identity: a certain gawky ebullience that embraces irresolution, hesitation, repetitiveness; the awkward, offhand and off-kilter.