The American artist Kara Walker poses questions about slavery’s history and legacy with a major UK commission.

Mamma Andersson, Titus Kaphar, Merlin James

The Portuguese painter was on view earlier this Spring

The legendary choreographer’s performative drawings are on view through January 25

To Walker and Bradford alike, density of visual information is an aesthetic choice that mirrors the mutliple layers of reality and complexity retrieved from subject matter.

Brilliantly colored, covered with decorative motifs and gestural abstractions, the work suggests a gorgeous manuscript, a place where the politics of place and the pain of indifference no longer exist.

Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Merlin James and Thomas Demand might seem as different as two contemporary artists can be. But a coincidence of means begs a comparison between shows of overtly contrastive mood and art-world temper. For both artists make their final images from models of their own making.

Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly

Just as Mr. Cemin’s somewhat romantic synthesis of the organic and the mechanical begins to relate to Mr. Hyde’s collision of the wayward and the contained, along comes Ms. Leirner, to remind the company that it is just art that’s being talked about.