In a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum, artwork takes on a very conceptual form. The work, produced by Cornell’s own art faculty, displays a variety of complex ideas and poses questions about the discipline of art itself. The new exhibit confounds the usual practice of many art exhibits, which typically invite the viewer to create a history or explanation based on his or her own unique interpretation and perception of the aesthetic image. Instead, this show asks you to dig deeper to think of the ontological questions that art puts forth.

The new Little Black Book exhibit at the Johnson Museum has ushered in the lonely, evocative reality of contemporary artist Peggy Preheim, whose pencilwork, sculpture and photography reflect each other in engaging ways. Preheim employs a diversity of mediums to generate a stylistically unified world that is nostalgic, haunting and as delicate as the lace-fringed Victorian dresses that clothe some of her ceramic-and-glass apparitions.

It is not every artist who can seamlessly move between multiple media, incorporating essential characteristics of one medium into another, or make every bit of his sculpture with his own hands rather than outsourcing the labor.

One of the artists who can is Mark Gibian ’80, a sculptor and printmaker who has an exhibition entitled Curvilinear: Sculptural Monoprints on view in Hartell Gallery this week.

The New York City art culture was alive at Cornell University on Tuesday night. New Works on Paper is an art exhibit of Mollie Miller ’10 and Sarah Carpenter ’10, students in the College of Art, Architecture and Planning (Carpenter writes for The Sun). The exhibit opened Tuesday night and will remain so until this Friday at the Olive Tjaden Gallery.

Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (known musically as Dean & Britta) brought Andy Warhol’s Factory to Cornell Cinema on Friday night. The duo provided the musical accompaniment for 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Together with the Andy Warhol Museum, Dean & Britta put together a set of songs to accompany 13 four-minute, black and white silent screen tests shot by Warhol in the mid-1960s. Playing both original compositions and cover songs, the band’s distinctive pop aesthetic seemed to be influenced by 1970’s punk rock (think a pleasant Joy Division/David Bowie combination).

In keeping with the Grapes of Wrath freshman reading requirement, there’s currently a small exhibit of Dorothea Lange’s depression era photographs at the Carol Tatkon Center on North Campus. These photographs illustrate the uncertainty, chaos and fear that ran rampant during the Great Depression. Most of the photographs are portraits, but some are simply taken of the areas in which the people photographed lived, worked and eventually died. These portraits are of those individuals hardest hit by the depression: migrant workers, sharecroppers and farmers, many of whom had to travel West in hope of finding jobs and starting anew.Lange's photos hang in the Tatkon Center

The Photography of Dorothea Lange

Tatkon Center Art Gallery

Aug. 21 – Sept. 30

As part of “The Grapes of Wrath at the Tatkon Center” series, a collection of Dorothea Lange’s photographs will be hanging until tomorrow. The collection includes the most famous images of her photographic documentation of the lives of California migrant workers in the 1930s, as well as some of her photographs documenting U.S. internment camps. The exhibit contains some of Lange’s most iconic works.

The Film and Video Works of Gordon Matta-Clark

Johnson Museum of Art

Sept. 12 – Dec. 13

In 2009, People Magazine selected and photographed around two dozen celebrities as the “World’s Most Beautiful People.” Maxim Magazine chose 100 hot women and published revealing pictures of a selected few. In the same realm, FHM cherry-picked the “100 Sexiest Women in the World.”

But no one did it quite like Andy Warhol, the most famous and revolutionary American pop artist of the late 20th century.

Like well-written prose, the current exhibition of works from the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, in Hartell Gallery teaches its audience how to view, or read, it. This is especially helpful because the audience of a show so far from its home is inherently foreign. Although the artistic language of artists from the eastern and western hemispheres is similar enough, the tone of the works from half a world away is perhaps unfamiliar to the western viewer. The show’s teaching mechanism refrains from being didactic; rather, it unobtrusively introduces a lens through which to understand its elements.

What do a 17th-Century Dutch printmaker, the Edict of Nantes and two present-day Ithacans have in common? Quite a bit, actually. So do the political commentary and a urine sample from Louis XIV. Their unifying thread is on display at the Johnson Art Museum’s new exhibition, Romeyn de Hooghe: Virtuoso Etcher, a show of de Hooghe’s etchings in subject matters ranging from the commercial to the political.