Jewish Museum

The current exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Masterpieces & Curiosities: The Fictional Portrait, does a few remarkable things, perhaps the most remarkable being that it begins to turn the institution inside out, to make not only its collection available to the visitor, but also the policies and procedures that underlie how it augments and organizes its collection.

Oversized frog heads; a thin, silk faille gown swathed in a cotton candy-colored parka; a cacophony of plaids, polka dots, chevrons, furs, sequins, feathers, tribal prints, and religious iconography. This is the world of Isaac Mizrahi, on view at the Jewish Museum.

Unorthodox, which addresses how art today might embrace the kind of complexity we demand from politics and history, is a large catalogue of paradoxes, or, in more material terms, of objects whose cultural significance is still ambiguous.

These works from Argentina explore the effects of living in a media-saturated world, but a theme as general as “media” can erase the specifics of a country’s identity.