Picasso and the Allure of Language takes the artist’s engagement with language beyond the smattering of words and letters that rise to the surface of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings.

The mirror in the title of this modest, but thought-provoking exhibition of video art is not an allusion to the age-old link between femininity and vanity. It refers instead to the technology particular to video, which creates an illusory fusion of self and image.

Tangled Alphabets charts the careers of León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, two twentieth-century artists who made language central to their dense, lyrical explorations of the visual world.

Even the word dazzling is not up to the job of describing the kaleidoscopic array of visual pleasures Mickalene Thomas offers in her first solo show at Lehmann Maupin Gallery.

Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection is a subtle chapter in the story of the Brooklyn Museum’s commitment to collecting and displaying feminist art. Burning Down the House shares a lot of artists, ideas, and assumptions with Global Feminisms: New Directions in Feminist Art, one of the largest, most ambitious, and well-publicized exhibitions devoted to feminist art in 2007.

Cutting Realities: Gender Strategies in Art is displayed on the first few floors of the Austrian Cultural Forum; a sleek, modernist building composed of glass and steel. Cutting Realities features work by artists from Central and Eastern Europe who confront, with a wide range of mediums and materials, how often representations of the body reflect prevailing gender hierarchies.

According to recent interviews, Whitfield Lovell’s earliest memories are of his father developing family photographs in the Bronx apartment where he was raised. Now, the artist collects photographs, tintypes, and calling cards of anonymous African-Americans, drawing their images on planks of stained and weathered wood and, most recently, on smooth cream paper.

Ghada Amer is best known for works that at first glance seem to be Abstract Expressionist paintings but are actually pornographic images of women embroidered onto canvases with colored thread. It is Amer’s choice to let the thread spill from these images, pouring into rhythmic tangles that create visual affinities with Abstract Expressionism’s swaths of color and gestural lines.

Venezuelan artist Gego once wrote that she sought “transparency of volume” in her work, “so that a form could be appreciated fully from all angles.”