Fine art in the year ahead

A key feature of much contemporary art is its ephemeral nature. Bulgarian-born artist Christo epitomizes this approach. In The Gates: Project for Central Park, New York City, he and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, have designed an installation of 7,500 steel-mounted panels of orange cloth that will be set up along the park's walkways for 16 days beginning Feb. 12 and then dismantled - the ultimate transitory experience.

Like Christo, French artist Daniel Buren wants audiences to enter the art, rather than stand back from it. To that end, he has painted cheerful awning-like stripes on architectural features from pillars to staircases. His stripes give "accents to the world we live in," Storr says. An exhibition of Buren's work appears at the Guggenheim in New York March 17 to May 8.

Obsolescence - both planned and unplanned - is also a theme of contemporary art. On this note, an innovative curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art has pulled together a display of photographic slide images from well-known contemporary artists, Slideshow, Feb. 27 to May 9. The exhibition follows Kodak's announcement in October that it was stopping manufacture of its carousel slide projectors. "The irony is that people thought photographic images would outlast painting," says Storr, who contributed an essay to the show's catalogue. But slide projection is becoming just another outmoded technology.

In the realm of the offbeat and unusual, sculptor Louise Bourgeois has a show of works on fabric, Stitches in Time, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Fla., from Feb. 12 to March 27. Taiwanese-American Chien-Chi Chang has made a series of riveting photographs of mental patients in Taiwan who, as part of their treatment, are chained together for long periods. The Chain series is on view at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego from March 19 to June 26. And 60 quilts made by women of an isolated black community in Alabama will be featured in The Quilts of Gee's Bend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, June 1 to Aug. 21.

For art lovers who gravitate toward paintings of earlier periods, there's plenty to choose from.

In Los Angeles, the LA County Museum will show 70 works by the Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael, one of the 17th century's finest landscape painters, June 25 to Sept. 18. The Getty Museum will feature the first major US survey of French painter Jacques-Louis David from Feb. 1 to April 24. David's life spanned the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.

Also worth noting are a combined exhibition of Cézanne and Pissarro at MoMA, which looks at the 20-year friendship of these two modernists, June 24 to Sept. 12, and the the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art's show of the Pre-Raphaelites, March 19 through May 29.

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